Cafe Mocha 주세요

I made an effort to go there at least once a day for a smoothie or a cafe mocha. It seemed silly at first, but I made an effort to say hello each time and embarrass myself enough to the point when he didn't have to feel embarrassed. I always waved goodbye. I always showed my worst packaged with my best. I was always honest and nonjudgemental. And like most things bittersweet, the feeling resisted explanation.

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I never really liked coffee. I tried it a couple of times in high school to become one of the Kool Kids, (because coffee seemed to be the universal symbol of adulthood and hipness) but the bitter taste and the peer pressure was never enough to make me pretend to like coffee. If anything, my teen rejection of the world made me an outward skeptic of coffee. Why sweeten something just enough to make the bitterness unnoticeable to... socialize? Or just so you can be relatable and claim social victory over those who didn't down as many cups of coffee as you in the morning? It just seemed silly.

But like reading the news regularly and learning to not care what other people think about you, my transition to self-assured adulthood and acquiescence to coffee came so gradually that I almost didn't notice.

In the beginning of the Seoul semester, I started going to Cafe's Oliver more regularly for very practical reasons: It had Minerva-grade wifi, the drinks were cheaper than other places, the cafe itself was tiny and relatively empty during the day, and it was less than a minute's walk from the residence hall. What more could I ask for? The owner spoke veeeeery minimal English, though, which I found strange considering his cafe was in Haebangchon, which is notorious for housing a large number of foreigners. But all in all, it was my best option and soon became my working spot of choice. As the semester took off, Minerva academics hit me hard, and the honeymoon-phase excitement of Korea wore off. I found myself exploring new coffee shops less and less, while leaning into the comfort of Cafe's Oliver more and more and more.

In SF, I remember Eduardo, one of the M19s, dropping a little gem of knowledge during a WIL. He said that as he made his way through the rotation cities, he found more depth and value from the couple of little things he invested in, instead of spreading himself too thin and cramming a lifetime's worth of city exploration into four months. "Invest in a system," he said, and what he meant was that if we pick one thing and do it over and over again, the resulting reward is higher because we can find more depth and gratification through that committed action. For him it was taking a class once every week and getting to know the people and community in that class. "I found friends for life," he said. For me? Well, I found a coffee shop that I really liked.

I started exclusively going to Cafe's Oliver, whether I really wanted coffee or not. It was owned by a quiet man (Oliver), and I raved to my friends about his smoothies and took others with me to study there. I instinctually recited closing times and marveled at the comfort and warmth of my daily Cafe Mocha. It's where I went whether I needed to crank out a 2000 word essay due the next day or wanted to "grab a coffee" with a new friend. It was my place. It's where I felt safe. The times when I felt lonely or emotionally exhausted or inexplicably out of it, I'd close my eyes and walk up the uneven steps of Art Market alley to Oliver's. Because at least there, nobody expected anything from me. I'd order my coffee, exchange loyalty card for credit card, and sit down in my favorite corner to stare out into the calm Seoul night. Oliver would sit behind the counter respectfully, and the soft music would play from the speaker behind the counter. It was predictable and nonjudgemental and it felt like home.

I spent my days like that, investing my time and money and energy into Cafe's Oliver, and slowly but surely, I watched the watered flower grow.

All it took were little gestures. I took him some banana bread that Ibukun made once, and another time, I brought him an Indian sweet from Texas, and his eyes lit up with child-like fascination at its flavor. Each time, he would pay me back with an orange or pastries or offer a free coffee. It felt silly. I wanted to get to know Oliver, the cafe owner. I wanted to share stories and explore cultures and make a new friend. And I'm sure he found the interactions awkward and clumsy at first, just as I did. Afterall, it's only respectful to live without debts, so my Indian sweet bought me a clementine and Ibukun's banana bread bought her brownie points for her next coffee visit.

One day, I took him some Indian tea bags. He had so many teas on his menu, but I'm sure he had never tried Elaichi tea before. "인도 차," I said and pushed the ziplock bag across the counter. "Oh!" His eyebrows perked up, thanked me profusely, and offered me a free coffee in return. It's only respectful to politely refuse a first offer in many Asian cultures, but this time, I fully refused. Friends don't keep tabs on debts. Friends pay each other in company. In safety. In smiles.

He smiled awkwardly and asked me how to make it. I explained in our familiar game of charades and broken Korean. "우유 and 차." I made a mixing gesture and he paused. "Uhh... hot?" he asked in a thick Korean accent. I smiled. "Hahah. Yes! And... sugar," I said tentatively. Did he know that word in English? He thought for a second. "Emmm... Ah! 예, sugar!" and he pulled out a large bag of white cane sugar. He picked up a spoon from a neighboring shelf and paused, "Uhh... how much?"

I don't think I'll ever be able to properly explain the excitement of successfully communicating with someone else who speaks a different language. Getting over the barrier of embarrassment and the temporary discomfort of doing something you've never done before, it felt like I climbed a mountain. Or like the feeling of listening to song that just... get's you. In his excitement to try this new tea, for a moment Oliver forgot to hesitate. He forgot to be embarrassed about his inability to speak English. He forgot that we didn't speak the same language or live in the same worlds, but it didn't matter. We both wanted to understand. And that little bit of caring was enough to set the rest in motion. "Little bit sugar," I said, gesturing with two fingers. "조금 sugar." And he laughed. "조금. Little bit."

Spending time at Oliver's began to feel like a daily reset, my little oasis of happiness away from the complexity and noise of the Minerva world. Slowly, he started trying to talk to me more and more. He began watering the friendship as much as I did, and what else could the flower do but grow? Who are we to resist the forces of nature?

When I brought a new friend with me to the cafe once, he brought out a plate of kiwis for us. "Aw 고맙습니다!" I'd say, and he would beam with pride at his hospitality. A friend of mine was a friend of his now, especially after I'd explained that we were all Minerva students. I asked him if he knew where we all lived, and he shook his head. He'd been running Cafe's Oliver for some three or four years now and never realized that the stream of teenage foreigners came from the fancy building a couple steps and a skip down the street. His eyes went wide with newfound knowledge. "Really?" he said. "Really," I said.

When a really loud group of aunties finally left his cafe once, he turned to me with an exasperated expression and sighed. "아줌마s," he shook his head with irritation, and I laughed. "So...loud, why?" he said, and I cackled as I shrugged. "I don't know," I said, glad that I wasn't the only one who was going crazy from their ruckus. He pulled out Papago and proceeded to complain through the translation app. I pulled out my phone to respond. So what if we didn't speak the same language. It's the 21st century.

Another time, I was searching for a cheap bakery to buy my friend a birthday cake. I walked and ordered my usual coffee to-go. "오늘..." I began in hesitant Korean. The front door opened, and I pulled out Papago. The app gracefully asked him if he knew any good bakeries for cakes. "Ah!" he said and then spewed rapid fire Korean onto my unsuspecting face. I blinked, wide-eyed. He smiled, eyed Papago for a second, but instead walked to the front of the cafe, gesturing for me to follow. "There, turn left, bakery, or go straight, down, right, other bakery." I nodded with a smile. Maybe communication doesn't need an exact language. I thanked him and confidently made my way down the street to buy some cake. Later, on my way back, I saw Oliver sitting out on the porch, chatting casually with a friend. He spotted me and smiled excitedly, mid sentence. Pointing to the bakery down the street, he managed a "did you get cake there?" I shook my head with a smile, "아니오, 너무 비싸요," I bumbled pridefully. "Ohhh!" he said. It feels good to show off your friends.

Perhaps my favorite story comes from the day Elisha and I went to Oliver's to work on an assignment. Distracted and agitated, I didn't feel like working that day. Elisha and I horsed around for a bit till I decided I wanted to buy another beverage. I turned my head and leaned backwards to get a look of the menu that hung above my head. "What about a tea?" she said, as I indecisively fidgeted through the menu written wholly in Korean. My reading was getting better, but it still took me quite a bit of effort to sound out the letters and then recognize the English words written in a Korean accent. I wanted to try a new drink this time. I always get a Cafe Mocha. Oliver waited patiently as his eyes bounced from the menu to my squinting eyes and then back again. "What does that one say," Elisha pointed, and I sighed. I'll just get a Mocha. That's when I decided that Oliver needed an English menu and spent the next couple hours Google translating and formatting his menu onto a Google Doc instead of writing my essay. I showed it to Elisha proudly, and she glared back, "We haven't done any work, Amulya!"

The next day, I printed out the neatly formatted menu and made my way to Oliver's with the print-out behind my back. I was so excited to see the look on his face. I ordered my usual Cafe Mocha, and as he handed me back my card, I pulled out the menu. At first, his eyes grazed over the words with curiosity, but as he understood what I had just handed him, he looked up with excitement. "Oh! Thank you so much!" he exclaimed. "Thank you! It's really needed!" He had been wanting to make an English menu for some time now, but didn't quite know how. He was so proud of it, he even posted it on his Instagram, and laminated it to put up on the wall. It felt good. I felt happy. I made someone happy, and that felt good. The flower was in full bloom.

I spent my days happily like that. Adventure after adventure, we spent our time learning and growing from each other's worlds. He told me that he went to music school and that starting his own cafe was his current dream. I was shocked at his musical background and begged him to play his guitar that always sat at the back of the cafe. He even taught me how to build a backing track one day when I showed him some of my music. We talked about his childhood and I told him about my school and my interests and we both stumbled our way through miscommunications and mangled translations in Papago.

"I'll teach you English if you teach me Korean," I said one day, frustrated at the energy that got lost in translation. We both wanted to talk about more complicated stuff, but complex sentences were not Papago's forte, and poetry has a way of resisting brute translation. "Okay!" he said, and as the days passed, I would correct his English and teach him basic grammar, and he would gleefully respond to my question-mark face with slowly pronounced Korean words. "My good teacher," he would call me. "Thank you, my good teacher!"

A couple weeks turned into a couple months, and without realizing it, the semester neared its end. The weather grew cold and the trek up the Art Market stairs felt longer than before. The warmth of the inside fogged up the cafe windows, and Oliver scampered over to take a picture of the Mickey Mouse I had just drawn on the cold glass. "I'll come visit you in Texas," he said, and as the little group of Minervans who grew to love Cafe's Oliver gathered more frequently to pick up the scraps of time left with our friend, I found myself growing anxious and worried.

What if this is it? What if I never come back to Korea ever again? What if I never meet Oliver again? I mean, I know that the internet exists and I can always message him, but that's not really the same, is it. The comfort that I got from merely existing in his company can't be replicated virtually. That visceral reaction to a place and its accumulated history and memories and the way your body eases into the crevices of a chair you sat in a hundred times... how can you replicate that?

And though a part of me knew that our friendship was strong enough to last the barriers of space, language kept us from sharing our worries. I can translate "I will miss you," but how do you translate "I'm worried that the laws of nature don't allow life long friends to form in a mere four months, and when I leave Korea, I'll just become another customer that could have been a good friend but didn't stay long enough to find out." I mean really, if I type that into Papago, it might just respond with an indignant alphabet soup of meaningless mess. Sure, I can gesture to how much sugar to put in a chai and Oliver can point me to the best bakery in town, but how do really get to know a person, if you can't talk about the things that are already hard to say.

Minerva doesn't make friendships easy. Moving every four months is great to cover a lot of ground, but it's made me hesitant to invest time and emotion into people that I can't reliably say will stand the test of time and space. What's the point of putting down roots, if you have to pull them up again in four months? Why water a flower that is destined to die one day or the other?

As winter break inched its way on and students gradually trickled out of the rez hall, the Cafe's Oliver bunch gathered for one last goodbye. There was some guitar playing and some singing and some coffee drinking and some teary eyes. The night was cold and bitter, but the inside of the cafe was bright and warm. We joked and laughed and whined about missing Oliver and made promises to come back and visit. My heart felt heavy and greedy and wanted this moment to last forever, but I knew how to enjoy the time that I had. I knew that this flower was here, right now, and maybe it won't be tomorrow, or maybe it will, but not matter its fate, I would enjoy it in the moment.

Every time I think back to the little pockets of happiness that I found in that cafe, it fills me with a kind of nostalgic warmth. Like the comfort of a heavy blanket weighing you down on a cold, harsh night. Or like the involuntary smile that creeps up at the unexpected sweetness of an eternally bitter drink. Like the language that resists translation. Like the poetry that defies explanation. Every time I think back to the laughter and the tears and inexplicable cold numbness that we shared in silence, or the hilarity of our broken sentences, or the immovable peace of wordless understanding, it fills me with a strange, bitter-sweet kind of feeling.

It reminds me how utterly absurd life is. But at the same time, how euphoric the love and beauty of friendship can be. Because even though on that final night, I couldn't guarantee our friendship would grow despite time and space and language and reason, I could guarantee that the moments we shared would live on in my memories. The moments that I invested in despite the cost of not visiting every other coffee shop in Korea, could be watered for eternity and enjoyed till my memory refuses to serve.

And until the day I go back to Korea and find my way back up those uneven Art Market steps, I'll find my warmth and comfort in sipping Cafe Mochas all around the world. Because that coffee is what makes cafes feel like home when I uproot myself every four months on this Minerva journey. It seems silly. I still don't really prefer the taste of coffee to the sweetness of milkshakes or the aroma of teas, but I'll admit that I enjoy drinking coffee anyway. Going to cafes to study is my norm now, and taking sip after sip from a steaming mug, is my way of translating a cherished friendship into a warm feeling. It's my way of understanding the lure of growing up and moving on and traveling the world, and in a way, maybe drinking coffee is a sign of adulthood. At least for me, it's become a beautifully simple reminder: revel in the bittersweet.