Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

How far would you go for a cup of joe?

Coffeehouse culture did not sweep through my small town until long after I graduated from high school and moved to a city. When I was a teenager and needed the jolt of caffeine and the heady aroma of bohemians to get me through the day, I had to drive to the nearest city to frequent my coffeehouse of choice. I have been a devoted coffee drinker and occasional coffee-slinger ever since. Though Michael Idov laments the long lost coffeehouses of Europe in his paean to the period when quiet talk in a coffee shop could signal revolution, I still think of the coffee shop as a cultural force. Today's chain coffee shops may attaract more Mom-Groups than splinter groups, but they will always attract anyone who needs a little pick-me-up, radical or not. I almost can't imagine a week without a trip to the neighborhood coffee shop, at the very least to pick up my beans.

Coffee-Slinger was my first job out of high school after moving away from my coffeeshop-less town. This may give you a clue about how long ago that was: I had pink hair for the interview and the owner made it very clear that "natural" was expected. I dyed it brown. When the coffee culture did finally hit my hometown, it rolled through with a vengeance, and now, in addition to the four sit-down shops in town, you can drive through at least three. Apparently, our fascination with the mobile cup is not ours alone. Ray Weisgerber photographs the region's drive-through espresso stands for his book, Driven to Espresso : Drive-Through Coffee Stands in the Northwest. These beautiful black and white photos showcase the amazing variety of drive-through coffee stands, from a double-decker bus to a trailer staffed by a bikini babe. I feel a certain kinship with these places because that first coffee job I mentioned--it was at a drive-through.

Someday I will go to Paris. I most likely will spend a day at the Louvre. I will probably make a trip to Versailles. I might walk along the Left Bank and I could even go to the Eiffel Tower. But the one thing I most assuredly will do is sit in a cafe. It sounds silly to travel the world and then hang out in a coffee shop, I know, but having a little time for reflection over a cafe au lait and a brioche is just my kind of itinerary item. I have never visited a city without researching and staking out a coffee or tea house as a break from the usual tourist attractions. When I go to Paris, I will bring Christine and Dennis Graf's handy guide, Café Life Paris: A Guidebook to the Cafes and Bars of the City of Light. The first time I held this lovely little gem I became so absorbed in my fantasy of Parisian life that I forgot I was actually supposed to be working in a library at the time. If you're skipping Paris but are still headed to the continent, you could also pick up Cafe Life Venice, Florence or Rome by different authors.

I don't think too much about how my coffee is produced. To relieve my ignorance, I've got Black Gold, a film by Marc Francis and Nick Francis which focuses on Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, who is a tireless crusader attempting to get fair prices for Ethiopian coffee farmers. I am crazy about Ethiopian coffee and have been known to travel to more than one coffee shop in a day in pursuit of a pound of Ethiopia Mordecofe, but the famine in the 1980s has left me with a warped impression of Ethiopia as a land of unrelenting poverty. The Ethiopia of this film is green, lush, and populated with people who are working hard for a fair shake in the global economy.