Tutti Liberi Subito- Best of Travel 2015

Too much cheap bullshit has been blown into the bloodstream of the Internet about how you should be a traveler, and not a tourist, so much so that the original statement has lost much of its meaning. What does being a traveler imply, after all, besides some Instagram shots of the second most interesting thing in a city as the first one is just too mainstream these days.

Thing is, I do instinctively hate organized tourism without having been taught to do so. Always did, even before having anything to do with herds of tourists flocking like hordes of barbarians to the Eiffel Tower, Colosseum or the Houses of Parliament. Though frankly, the barbarians get bad press, roaming around in a time of general continental mess is more justifiable than trampling little old ladies for a selfie. One of my worst nightmares is the time I had to grind through the endless maze of the Musei Vaticani to make it to the Sixtine Chapel- and once there, listen to a multilingual choir of ’this is it?!’.

No, that’s not it. ’It’ is that time I arrived in Turin in a fine winter drizzle, which had been advertised by the ever ebullient Italian media as ’forti nevicate al Nord’, and had to wait about an hour for the most elusive of buses. Under the sheltering umbrella of another transportation victim, I could quite literally soak in the city’s motions and rhythms.

Or that other time when I was sitting in the back seat of a car in the most average of villages in Turkish Thrace, watching the most average of summer evenings unfold in a way which was both completely familiar and alien. Or that time I was sitting in a cafe in Vienna, sipping a kleiner Brauner and staring into the distance, not really reading my book but listening to the indefinite lull of German surrounding me and saying to myself how, given the right time and place, it’s actually such a beautiful language.

And that time I turned away from the palace in Knossos and gazed over the hills around it, noticing how they shimmered in the scorching Mediterranean sun, hundreds of mirrors used by the locals to ripen their crops even faster- modern world insanity meets Balkan solutions to everything.

Best of 2015- Coffee Cups

As opposed to cats, coffee took quite a long time to grow on me. When everyone was downing cup after cup during exam sessions, I would put on a refrained smile and keep on reaching for my can of Coke. Mind you, I still love Coke, and it’s one of those things, like Coldplay, that I plan to be forever unapologetic about. Yes, it’s an explosion of sugar and artificial flavour enhancers (just like Coldplay, come to think of it), but even the distant fizz of a can being opened puts me in a state- I know, it’s called addiction, but everyone needs the poison of their choice.

So back to coffee, I did have a nice big cuppa one night before my American history exam, and then at 4 am, when I could recite all the amendments of the constitution pretty much by heart but was still staring at my bedroom ceiling with my limbs shaking I said no more of this lethal brown liquid, and to this principle I stayed true for almost a decade.

Then, about three years ago, one fine morning in January I said, well, it’s kind of cold and I’m sort of sleepy, maybe I could have a latte. So I did. A big latte filled with honey and agave syrup- more precisely, what today I call a crime against both humanity and common sense, surpassed only by the green monstrosity of matcha latte. Next day I said, well why not have that latte again. A hundred or so days later I gave up on the honey, and then the agave syrup departed from my life as well.

Soon enough, I discovered that I was craving morning caffeine to degrees which could not be properly serviced by a latte. So I switched to flat whites. And then, on another epic day, in Italy, as luck would have it, I discovered that I could simply have a pitch dark espresso. 

And ever since, I have measured my life with coffee cups. Or with distances from one coffee shop to another- of which there are plentiful in Budapest, because we are painfully cool, I know. And still, I have missed a few, so I might as well add visiting them to those new year's resolutions I never manage to keep and see if for once I succeed.

'New wave' Turkish coffee in Kelet- minus the dregs, which is a bit disturbing

The real deal, dregs and all, in 2Cafe Karaköy

Espresso with a prickly friend, Addicted2Caffeine

That time I read about owls in My Little Melbourne

Summer delights in the Massolit garden

An Italian novel demands a small but viciously strong espresso

How my morning walk invariably ends up looking come spring

Lavender days in Budapest Baristas

The My Little Melbourne pit stop with a bit of reading thrown in

The inevitable accident of spilling the coffee while shuffling it around for a better shot

As I was saying, Italian novels and espressos

A Massolit espresso in all its lonely beauty

Spring with latte in Sarki Fűszeres

And for a change, spring with latte in Espresso Embassy

When in Vienna, have some coffee (I might have tried reading in German as well, I guess)

When the table matches your accidental bookmark in Café Demel

Geometry in Espresso Embassy

And here's my espresso with one of those lovely surprise finds in my home library

I am a pretzel fiend and proud of it

The almost nearly perfect espresso- and my favourite coffee shop logo at Budapest Baristas

So I went a bit over the top in Café Torino, but I just had to indulge in a bicerin, and cute little cookies

To more serious stuff, that killer Italian espresso in Café Florio

Channeling France in Gerlóczy

Autumn rains arrive at My Little Melbourne

And then autumn moved on

But here's to finishing in a very summer mood, with a Velence lake espresso