Road Trip Diaries

I am scraping the bottom of the barrel for topics today.

The coffee vending machine in the office makes lovely coffee; you can have it hot or iced, or you can have green tea, black tea, Coke, or various branded drinks I’m not familiar with.

Never mind those though: the coffee is the main attraction, and on my first full day I drank enough of it to give myself a pretty nasty headache. It only gives you half a cup, and sports a cartoony illustration demonstating how if they gave you a full cup, there would be no bearably cool surface by which to hold the cup. I was soon taught the winning strategy of hitting the “extra strong” button, then topping up the cup from the adjacent hot drinking water dispenser. The full cup can be savely held by the rim.

Other than the quality of the coffee, there are two things I like about this machine. Firstly, it is set to free vend. This seems to be a global policy with my employer. Full marks. Secondly, it takes its time making a coffee, and I get the feeling it’s putting a lot of care and attention into every cup. There is a progress indicated of five LEDs, and as they light up one by one, you hear noises from inside the machine. I imagine there is a tiny goblin barista in there. I hear a coarse whirr — is he grinding the beans? There are three sharp taps — perhaps he is tamping the ground coffee into a filter. Some squirting noises, a final whirr, the fifth LED lights; then every light on the machine flashes. My coffee is ready.

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For lunch: hot soba noodles.

For dinner: hotel buffet. There was roast beef, which I enjoyed in open hypocrisy in light of my Sunday criticism of the expats at Tokyo Weekender.

For after-work entertainment: Slitherlink with old episodes of 24 in the background. Last night featured the best 24 moment ever: the triumphant surprise return of Tony Almeida.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Japan 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.