Are you a coffee person or a tea person?

While I would love to say that it’s both and I definitely do drink my fair share of tea, the honest answer is that I drink far more coffee overall. To make matters worse, my coffee drinking habits can be traced back all the way to my childhood days. My mother said around the time that I was three years old she began to notice that all of a sudden one day her coffee was all gone. She dismissed it as her getting old and forgetful, thinking that she had simply forgotten that she had already finished her mug. Then, one day she saw it all unfold: there I was caught red-handed. She watched me as I crept over to the coffee table and carefully drank every last drop of what was once her coffee. Another time she caught me doing the same with my father’s cup of coffee as well; though apparently I spat it all out since he took his coffee black, which gave her a laugh. I guess from that young age it was all over, and I had become addicted to drinking coffee.

Coffee also became something of a habitual thing for me. I would always wake up before my mother and so it became something of a household tradition where I would turn on the coffee maker and have her and my cup ready by the time she was awake. On the weekends sometimes just the two of us would go through a couple pots of coffee together.

By the time I was in university I worked part time in a café and learned to make lots of different drinks, which only seemed to fuel my coffee needs even more. We could take home a drink with us after our shifts and I learned to make myself a chai tea latte with an espresso shot inside, caffeine upon caffeine really. I took all my newfound knowledge back home with me and would experiment making my own different coffees in my dorm room.

Now as a working adult who has night owl tendencies, I still drink what at times feels like copious amounts of coffee. How tired I am in the morning determines how large my morning coffee will be. Which is then followed by a cup in the afternoon and maybe again another in the evening. If I know I will be busy in the night but need an extra pick-me-up, then I’ll probably have another cup again. When I was younger, I enjoyed my coffee with cream and sugar, but again, as an adult my taste buds have changed as well and now I only really ever take my coffee black.

After moving to Japan, I have noticed I drink tea more often, and usually with meals I’ll have either oolong tea, green tea, or some other forms of tea. I also really like trying new types of tea as well, but tea still doesn’t quite have that caffeine kick that I need. So, overall, my go-to drink for some extra energy is probably always going to be coffee. Yet, I don’t drink coffee just for the caffeine benefits, I also generally do enjoy the taste and so I enjoy sweets with coffee flavors as well. I guess you could say I have a real genuine love of coffee.

Sandy

Vocabulary

make matters worse (idiom) - to make a bad situation worse
see it all unfold (idiom) - to see a situation happen and for its outcome to become clear
newfound (adjective) - recently discovered, gained, or achieved
copious (adjective) - large in quantity or number
pick-me-up (noun) - something that makes you feel more energetic or cheerful