Coffee Shop

Living out as far as I do, you don’t get many opportunities for spontaneity. I mean, things come up that you never expected, but it’s usually something that somehow adds more stress to your life, rarely the, “Ooh, why don’t we go bowling tonight” kind of things that are just fun. We have a grand total of 5 restaurants in our town, and 3 are in “hotels”, or the closest thing to that we have. It’s not really safe to be out after dark, so your choices for evening entertainment are whatever DVDs you brought with you (or the pirated copies you buy from the “supermarket”), playing a game with friends who may live in the neighborhood, or reading a book. Needless to say, my bedtime has gotten a LOT earlier!

But yesterday we got a real chance to be spontaneous. Kelli and I had gone to a friend’s home to meet some visitors and eat homemade pizza and ice cream (a treat in itself!) and were riding home with Billy and Joanna and their two little girls, Elsie and Lucy. Someone mentioned the new coffee shop that opened in town recently, Africa by Boat. (I’m still not sure how you reach our land-locked corner of Africa by boat, but I’m going to ask around…) Billy suggested that we try it out, so we made a detour through town. As we got out of the car, we realized that all three of us ladies were wearing trousers in town… and felt really uncomfortable. (We had been with all Westerners all afternoon, so trousers were completely fine… until we decided to be spontaneous. Oops!) We walked up to the coffee shop on the second floor of a storefront and were greeted by Zora, the owner of Africa by Boat. She brought us chairs to sit on the balcony overlooking the street. The menus haven’t been printed yet, but she told us our choices were black coffee, white coffee, tea, or bottled water. Okay, so no caramel macchiato or chocolate chip frappuccino for us… but we really enjoyed our baby-thermoses full of white coffee (coffee with LOTS of milk and a spice blend). Maybe Zora’s got some work to do before she can compete with Starbucks or Liquid Highway, but hey, I’m glad just to have somewhere to go and drink coffee. Oh, happy day! :D