Café

Sunday afternoon was quickly fading into evening, and I needed to get out of the apartment. I decided to get some homework done (midterms are coming up), so I packed up my bag and headed outside. I wandered around looking for a café, no café in particular, just anything that I should come across that seemed somewhat quiet.

After twenty minutes I found it. It was nothing special and wasn’t my first choice, but it was less noisy than the more popular spot one block away. In reality, it was just a little sandwich shop. Nothing too fancy or stylish, but it was clean and had an open table and coffee, which was all I was really asking.

I seated myself next to a table of three señoras whose group increased to six by the time I was done working on vocabulary readings and sipping coffee. They chatted the whole time, most of them at the same time. The talking/listening ratio was pretty imbalanced, but none of them seemed to mind. Wrapped up in their (faux?) fur coats, they would lean forward and stick their chins out toward the window in order to observe passers-by, of course commenting on each one. Sometimes their neighbors or friends would walk past, and everyone would try to communicate through the storefront window. I wondered why those on the sidewalk didn’t just walk through the door four feet away and come inside, but their conversations through the glass were certainly entertaining.

The señoras weren’t the only observers. As I was facing the window as well, I couldn’t help but be distracted by people-watching every so often, although most of the time when I looked up, someone was already surveying me. Their looks were not judgmental and did not communicate anything other than genuine curiosity, the same way I was looking back at them. After a few seconds, people would pass on, and I would turn my attention back to word morphology, that is, unless I was turning my attention to the flat screen TV above my head playing the FC Sevilla game.

As darkness began to blanket the city and it was time for dinner, I strolled back to the apartment feeling absolute contentment. Those couple of hours in an unassuming café watching people go through their everyday lives left me in great mood (although I think caffeine also had something to do with this). Such scenes will stand out more vividly in my memory than any random castle or artist’s masterpiece.