coffee shops.

how many coffee shops does one town need? i first came to mcleod ganj in 2004. there were more coffee shops--REAL coffee shops, espresso-brewing coffee shops--than i'd ever seen in one little indian town. almost six years later, their number has multiplied, tripled, quadrupled, erupted into more and more coffee shops everywhere you turn. i'm so caffeinated i can hardly sit here and write this. i am a jittery foot tapper with too many plans to fit into one cold, bright day.

people say moon peak has the cutest waiters, but i think it's an idea left-over from a time when it was true. next to it now--a physically bigger little brother--is mandala coffee, complete with wi-fi. (little brother always gets the good stuff). and down the hill by the temple, coffee shops are opening so fast i don't even know their names--white spaces with cushioned seats, exposed bricks, thick mugs with matching platters, sugar in slender paper tubes, mini spoons meant just for stirring. and everywhere, everyone drinking coffee--tourists and monks and amdo boys in leather jackets--coffee coffee coffee. stopping to greet me in a patch of unexpected sun, a tibetan friend sipped my latte and grimaced. "american drink," he said, but i drink more coffee here than in america. i drink so much coffee i forget to eat. i drink so much coffee that i've stopped sleeping. i drink so much coffee that i feel the need to exaggerate. this is the MOST coffee i've ever had. i'm speaking in superlatives. it's just the coffee; it'll wear off.

there's a place on bhagsu road (this is no time for names) where i once fell in love and there's a place past the post office where i once fell out of it, and there's a place crowded in by kashmiri tourist shops where i always talk politics, and there used to be a place behind some stairs where i pretended i was in america, and there's a tiny, smoke-blackened place where i used to deny i was american, and there's all the other places in between. coffee. how could there be so much in this one little town? yesterday i met a friend on the road--i'd thought he was in nepal, but no--who greeted me with, "let's go drink tea," but tea has become a euphamism for coffee, and he lead me back towards the bus stand, pulled as if by gravity, to his favorite cafe--"there's a nice new place," he said--and then we were descending shaky stairs into a new coffee-shop/internet-cafe cross breed, where we at underneath a giant, blaring flat screen TV. i can't say i liked the place but coffee is a personal thing and in this town, there's room for strange choices.

maybe coffee is a necessity of life here. maybe when you pile so many people up on top of each other, so many peoples, so much history and language and politics and so, so many different agendas, you need an extra push just to face it all. but probably not. coffee is hip. spaces where one drinks coffee are hipper. everyone likes to feel cool, like they're part of something--cigarettes and fingerless gloves and popped-up collars and half-read books and partially-filled-out visa applications and flirting and writing and stretching after that first cup--it's all a ritual. i wish i weren't so revved up, so edgy, but i take part in it all because i like it.

but i've got to stop writing now. i'm meeting someone. guess where.