By Jack Chou
On a typical Tuesday morning, I can manage to roll my lazy butt out of bed as early as 10 a.m. After sleeping on the couch another thirty minutes, I’d stagger my way up and out, and maybe make it to school in time for the last period of my macroeconomics class. Lunchtime is spent bleary-eyed and hungry, contemplating whether anyone would notice if I crawled under the table to continue my interrupted repose, while my fellow writers jabber enthusiastically about the Foreign Exchange. But for my darn dignity, I might actually do it. The last three periods of the day are endured just conscious enough to respond to the teacher’s questions, but never awake enough to know the answers. By the end of the day I’m spent. To hell with whatever classes I was supposed to be taking at night, I’m too exhausted. I’m going home to sleep. Now, before you give me an earful about my sleeping habits, midnight pizzas, and the rock music I put on to help me sleep, let me say I’m done with that rhetoric. In my opinion, there is nothing a good cup of coffee cannot cure. But where to find this black elixir? Determined to start behaving like a proper college student, I skipped class one day to prowl the proximity of our campus. This is my journal: I fortified my resolve the night before by not sleeping and reading Shakespeare, driving myself to the brink of sheer exhaustion the best way I know how. I also bought some antacid tablets. I started my quest with the Gino Café, located above Burger King and next to the campus Eslite branch. I found my way through the crowd (sorry, did I say crowd? There hasn’t been a crowd here since the new prices) to the café. Italian food is the staple of this place, but it still offers a respectable selection of coffee, and after a careful survey I chose a hot latte to kickstart the day. The coffee was nothing to write about, but the atmosphere, an alluring montage of literature and jazz, somehow made it taste better. I could almost imagine I was in a European café. Apparently others felt the same way, because I wasn’t there two minutes before I heard people speaking in English and Japanese. I sipped my coffee, leaned back, closed my eyes in contentment. This is life for a scholar of language and literature! But then into my reverie came the sound of a Spanish conversation. Exactly the class I was skipping, so I quickly left the place. My next stop was the Corridor Café, located in the dome-shaped new gymnasium. My timing was good, if not exactly smart: a little less groggy and I would have been frightened away by the prices. I blundered right in, and found myself a seat by its curved, glass wall overlooking the swimming pool. Coffee by the water, lovely. I wonder whether I should commend the designer’s vision or grotesque sense of humor. While it certainly is a view few competitors could hope (or want) to emulate, it is debatable whether observing flabby, seminude bodies goes well with a cup of joe. Especially with the largely male swimming population. Such shortcomings aside, the Corridor Café is a very classy establishment, where you might even catch an occasional mini concert. I would recommend it for anyone with cash to burn. Or who simply has a thing for middle-aged bathers; I’m not here to judge. Crunching an antacid pill, I rambled all the way to the Hsin-hai Gate, where I found what remained of the once glorious Mos Burger joint. Deposed by Burger King, it now occupies only a stall, but may pass for a coffee shop for the three varieties it offers. Its iced coffee is divine—cheap and plenty, I’ve been glugging it for years. It doesn’t have enough caffeine to keep a sinner awake before execution and perdition, much less sustain a student during finals, so today I decided to experiment with the cappuccino. Before I hurried on, I bought a cup of my favorite iced coffee to wash away the aftertaste, and popped another antacid tablet. In the student activity center near the library is the Renaissance Café, an establishment that hung on even as its neighbors came and went. True to its name it sports a classic Renaissance look, and the prices are surprisingly acceptable. Curiosity ruined the first impression, however. The second floor was downright banal in contrast, with its absurd addition of ceiling fans and blaring rap music. I picked the afternoon tea combo: coffee with unlimited refills, plus all the pizza you can eat. By now I was awake enough to be suspicious. Further inquiry revealed that the free refills came from a poor little coffee machine, containing what appeared to me to be asphalt. As for all the pizza you can eat, well, let’s just say the first piece looked like all the pizza I’d want to eat. And then I was introduced to their trademark Renaissance Iced Coffee, ostensibly renowned for the ice cube made of coffee blobbing in the center of the gooey, brown brew. It was great fun trying to make the ice melt so that the coffee will not be wasted (or recycled—who knows?) but ultimately I remembered I only have some fifty years left to live, and not a minute more of it should be spent in that place than absolutely necessary. By this time I was wondering if I should go on much further. It was not only that my wallet was taking the worst blow since the last woeful time I wooed, but I felt I was discovering a darker side to business on campus than I’d like to know. My visit to the recently opened NTU Farm (really, that’s what the plaque proclaims) confirmed my fears. Competition with the nearby Mozart Café (Stall) is stiff, as both shops catered to students struggling to stay awake in the nearby classroom buildings, and the workers were hardly polite or deferential. It took a flash of cash for them to loosen up. They suggested I try something besides coffee, like their menu of special teas, supposedly cultivated by our very own Department of Agriculture. They recommended the tea inexplicably named something like Birds, Souls, and Sesame as a favorable substitute for coffee, pulling a bag of the stuff out of a suspiciously commercial looking package. And once they got my money, they left me to fend for myself from the most tasteless liquid I’ve ever had. Thank god for Mozart. Mozart not only offers better beverages, it offers them at better prices and with brighter smiles. Like its rivals, it is not just a coffee shop, but more of an all-purpose goodies store catering to all your munchies needs. My interest in it was purely caffeinated: and again, in the interest of the article, I experimented with something I had not dared try yet, the espresso. It certainly looked harmless; in fact it seemed almost like a rip-off, pooling at the bottom two centimeters of the styrofoam cup. I downed it in a gulp. I still had money left, and plenty of energy, but suddenly my supply of antacid seemed inadequate. In any case, I had completed my quest. I had found the best black elixir on campus. It was time to head home, and contemplate what to do for the next forty or fifty sleepless hours. Before I started homeward, I picked up a box of instant cappuccino in a convenience store. Provide your own hot water, and you get eight doses of caffeine for the price of one. Why didn’t I do this first? Still, there’s no way I’d oversleep or miss a class, ever again. a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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