Exploring Koror... Part II

With a few hours to spare and not wanting to spend the rest of the evening in the hotel, we thought it was wise to get back to Koror, and see first-hand city-life, island-style!

Koror city is bisected by the Main Street and much of city-life is centered around this spine. Along the Main Street, you would find a mall (WCTC Shopping Center), a supermarket (Surangel's), numerous restaurants, hotels and tour shops...

We walked into WCTC for some souvenir shopping and then crossed the Main Street to Surangel's...

Surangel's was teeming with people doing their post-Christmas shopping. There was a festive atmosphere around here and people looked really happy. Perhaps there is something in island life that keeps you happy!

And we were surprised to see turmeric from India on sale here!

And I almost rubbed my eyes in disbelief when I saw packaged food from ITC's Kitchens of India on sale in Surangel's! Wow, India's soft power is coming right here into the heart of the Pacific!

We stopped by at a cafe - Coffee Berry right door, simply because it offered free wifi to its patrons. Run by a friendly Taiwanese, we ordered a coffee and quickly got on to our Whatsapps!

I must say the coffee was pretty good, but the internet speed sucked all the battery life in our phones. So we spent time enjoying Coffee Berry's quotes on coffee...

Indeed yes...

I cannot disagree...

O wow! Biryani in Koror! Life can't get better than this, especially seeing India's  India's soft power in a free-flow here...

The good thing about eating out in Palau is you get to be treated like a royal. We walked into Suriyothai, a Thai restaurant on the Main Street, which is no different in this respect. The staff was extremely friendly and eager to help. Our orders came barely 10 minutes which is great by all standards. The food was very very delicious! Overall, would rate Suriyothai very highly!

And it was finally time to head back to Airai!

A Delightful Scandinavian Meal...

All these days, we had been thoroughly enjoying Korean cuisine, besides Indian food at home. But today, we had a real surprise, a gastronomical surprise, when we traveled to Gwangmyeong to visit the Ikea outlet, which incidentally happens to be the biggest Ikea in the world...

After a long 2 hour commute from Songdo, by the time we reached Gwangmyeong, we were famished. And to save time we headed straight to the Ikea restaurant...

The restaurant was teeming with people taking a break from their shopping to have a bite... 

Trolleys full of goodies were rolled out. Every moment in the queue is agonising when you're hungry...

After 20 minutes in the queue, we were ready to dig in - delectable Swedish meatballs...

Vegetable balls...

Grilled salmon - this was amazingly good....

Dessert...

And massive amounts of bitter, sugarless espresso that put me in such a trance that I just could no hear Neeti shout out to me "Let's head shopping now!"...

Black as Hell, Strong as Death, Sweet as Love...

Throughout our travels around Istanbul and Cappadocia during our Turkey Trip, one common thing that accompanied me all through was Türk Kahvesi or Turkish coffee!

My initiation to kahvesi began onboard the Bosphorus cruise. The coffee appeared like tar, a brown-black sludge. But willing to experiment, I tasted it quite willingly.

Kahvesi was quite literally an assault on the senses on the first sip, but by the second sip, I fell in love with it completely, and absolutely. And by the third sip, I was ready to kill and maim for one more cup of kahvesi. That is the magic of this dark, bitter-sweet elixir.

Coffee initially came from the highlands of Ethiopia, where it was discovered quite by accident, from where it went across the Red Sea to Yemen. By the late 15th century, the Arabian region had come under the Ottoman influence. And quite naturally, coffee culture spread to Istanbul by the early 16th century. The Ottoman-Bosnian chronicler, İbrahim Peçevi, reported the opening of the first formal coffeehouse in Constantinople:

Until the year 1554, in the High, God-Guarded city of Constantinople, as well as in Ottoman lands generally, coffee and coffeehouses did not exist. About that year, a fellow called Hâkem from Aleppo and a wag called Şems from Damascus, came to the city: they each opened a large shop in the district called Tahtakale, and began to purvey coffee.

In sense, the modern coffeeshops - Starbucks and the Cafe Coffee Days, all owe it to the Turks! The Turks might as well demand some royalties...

And in 1538, when the Ottoman Turks annexed Yemen, they gained a monopoly over coffee trade. They parboiled coffee beans and exported them from a Yemeni Red Sea-port town called Mocha,. And thus came about the term "mocha."

Today, coffee is very much a part of Turkish everyday life and traditions. It is also a part of traditional Turkish wedding customs. Before the wedding, when the groom and his parents visit the girl's family, the bride must prepare and serve them coffee. And the fun part - for the groom's coffee, the bride use salt instead of sugar to gauge his character. If he drinks his coffee without any sign of displeasure, the bride assumes the groom is good-tempered and patient.

And the Turks use coffee for fortune-telling or kahve falı - the sediment left after drinking is turned over onto a saucer. They believe that the patterns of coffee grounds can predict your fortune!

But who cares about the future, when you have excellent kahvesi this very moment. And I fully agree with this old Turkish proverb that says “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love”.

Smell The Coffee!

Even though I have largely been a tea-drinker for the last 15-odd years, I do occasionally enjoy a cup of very strong coffee with a hint of cream and just about a pinch of demerara sugar.

Coffee for me has this amazing ability to "wake me up", to heighten my sensory faculties, to leave behind that amazing bitter after-taste in my mouth that keeps me "high" for a few hours. And the aroma of coffee is  nothing but simply magical.

Coorg was the place where I discovered the best coffee. I cannot forget that day in January 2011, sitting in the veranda of that 100-year old colonial plantation bungalow and sipping on an amazingly aromatic thick black coffee liquor. It was a lazy day, bright and sunny with a rather cool breeze blowing. All around were sounds of silence, green plantations and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting in the air.

That was sheer bliss for me!

More recently, Bru introduced premium world coffees in the market, Bru Exotica - coffees from the Killimanjaro, Brazil and Colombia. I could not resist picking up a bottle of Killimanjaro coffee despite its steep price of Rs. 300 a bottle, simply because this coffee supposedly came very close from my motherland, Uganda.

Talking of Ugandan coffee, which has been very prized for long, during Idi Amin's reign of terror, the economy had collapsed and the Shilling crashed alongwith the onset of spiraling inflation. In those trying times, coffee was the unofficial currency for Ugandans in the countryside. The resilient Ugandans used to risk their lives carrying coffee in their canoes all across Lake Victoria to Tanzania or Kenya for some money that was worth more than wads of Ugandan Shillings. (My Dad has lucidly described the resilience of Ugandans in his blogs). That's how they survived. Today, however, Uganda has regained its prestige in the world of coffee, but climate change does threaten it.

One coffee that I would really love to try is the one from ancient land of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian civilization is quite old. It predates Christ and goes way back to age of Solomon the Great, who supposedly was madly in love with an Ethiopian queen, the Queen of Sheba. (Indeed, Ethiopian women are really pretty - ask me, I recently saw the flight crew of Ethiopian Airlines in Mumbai - they were all lissome and sharp featured!)

Legend has it that Ethiopia has been the cradle of coffee. A sheep herder once saw his flock chewing on some berries and getting high. Those berries, with time, came to be known as coffee berries!

In 1981, our family did pass by Addis Ababa for a few days. I was 5 then - too young to have coffee. But today, I am a big boy(!) and I would love to go back to Ethiopia, smell and drink Ethiopian coffee and also visit the great heritage of this ancient civilisation - rock carved churches at Lalibela, monasteries at Axum that are believed to house the legendary Ark of the Covenant and tablets of the Ten Commandments, the Blue Nile monasteries of Bahir Dar, castles of Gondar and the grand Rift Valley! Ethiopia also has a rich culinary heritage - injera (much like our Indian dosa), fit-fit, wat and many other delights!

It isn't hard to understand why they say "Smell the Coffee". But for me, smelling the coffee right in the morning is a big NO. I would rather wake up saying to myself something I adapted from a dialogue from one of favourite films, Jerry Macguire - "I have rolled with the punches, but today is another day!"

That does keep me going, till about afternoon, when I sometimes indulge in literally smelling the coffee!

Starbucking Has Just Begun!

A few years ago, while visiting Hong Kong, Starbucks (Staabaa as the locals called it in Hong Kong!) was the preferred place for us to have a steaming hot cup of either coffee or tea, alongwith a few green tea cookies which we absolutely loved.

Then, almost a year after that we visited Coorg, where it was enthralling seeing how a uniquely aromatic coffee is grown in lush green estates of Tata Coffee, alongwith spices like cardamom and pepper. That inspired Neeti, a pure tea-drinker to write about flirting with coffee, which she had covered in her blog.

Little did we realise at that moment that Starbucks was going to partner Tata Coffee to get the chain to India, sourcing coffee from the same lovely green plantations that we had visited about two years back.

About 10 days back, their first outlet opened at Horiman Circle followed by two more, one of which was closer to home, at Oberoi Mall.

We made a serious attempt to visit the outlet for breakfast today - the anticipation of having green tea cookies again kept awake till long last night! But we overestimated ourselves. Breakfast at Starbucks was tall order, as laziness ruled the weather, at home, this morning.

I thanked my stars when we finally left home at nearly 1PM. In about 20 minutes we were at Oberoi Mall. But the time we saved in getting to Starbucks was all wasted in the long queue full of excited people - mostly young, some elderly and few expatriates for whom having Starbucks coffee surely must be nostalgic.

After about 30 minutes of waiting, we got a table. We were to place our orders - frappucinos, double chocolate chip muffins, mushroom chicken pie and a corn brioche.

I must admit that the frappucino was intensely flavourful. The pie was flaky, crusty and fresh - the chicken inside was meaty without an overbearing spiciness that is so common at a Café Coffee Day or a Barista. The muffin too was much better than what I have had elsewhere. As Neeti put it, it was again, another flirtation with coffee!

But to my dismay, there were no green tea cookies!

As we moved out, the Café Coffee Day outlet hardly had a soul in it. So did Gloria Jeans. This was the Starbucks effect for sure.

While the stuff here at Starbucks was excellent, it is indeed too early to give a verdict. Today Starbucks has only three outlets, all in Mumbai. Will the quality still be the same when they have over 50, 100, 200 outlets? I wonder! It will be a challenge - in the Indian restaurant and café business quality does indeed take a plunge with an increased reach.

Despite enjoying a decent snack, my mind was still on the green tea cookies! And I could not resist calling my sis to send in some from Starbucks in China! Our real Starbucking has just begun!