Dear Readers, In my last column, I revealed deeper layers inside my spiritual coffee love addiction ritual, so I’m sure you understand how coffee is one of those things that I tend to find quickly and regularly at the grocery store gas station hotel lobby. I make strong efforts to avoid the instant sanka-like kind that dissolves directly into my cup because it always ends up hurting my tummy, but beyond that, my standards when it comes to coffee are not terribly high. I love really good coffee, but also I’ll down the styrofoam Motel 6 brew when the situation arises.
This week, my social media memories prompted my recall about that time I learned cevada is most certainly not coffee. When I first arrived in Portugal, I relied on Google Lens to help me read labels in the supermarket, but some things were a little more obvious, like eggs, produce, water or coffee. Or so I thought.
One of my classmates had started sleeping over at my apartment on Friday nights to reduce her commute from Braga to attend our Saturday morning classes in Porto, and I made a pot of “coffee” one morning (according to Facebook, two years ago) before we scrambled off to the metro to get to campus. The kind I was brewing was far more earthy or rustic than my usual preference. I warned that I didn’t really think this “coffee” was very good and mostly tasted like dirt but said she was welcome to have some. Pointing at the bag — foil-lined, shaped like a coffee bag, located on the coffee shelf —she said, “That’s not coffee. That’s cevada.”
I retorted, confident that it was clearly just a bad variety of coffee, and pointed to the “Delta Cafes” brand triangle at the top, reiterating its shelf location at the Mini Preço. She assured me that would be the proper location for this product because it’s a breakfast item. A hot, heavily-roasted, barley cereal, usually for babies or a tummy ache. Sort of like a malt-o-meal or cream-of-wheat cereal. But dark brown-black, like coffee, but not. I had been drinking hot black barley all week! Even though I thought it tasted like dirt!
Clearly I was adjusting seamlessly to my migration and cultural immersion. I was just three Instagram selfies from blossoming into a veritable Emily in Paris. (Is this where I mention I will credit all designers who send me couture to wear to the Pingo Doce where I’ll casually bump into a perfume mogul while we are both reaching for the last pastel de nata? If so, please remember I wear a grown women’s petite.)
I decided to share this blunder with y’all because we live in a world of edits and filters, cropping, misinformation and artificial intelligence. While I’m fully and officially intelligent, I still have goof-ups and deficiencies in understanding, and even though I am able to refine the details and curate the images I share online, behind the scenes, sometimes I’m really just making it day by day while I’m drinking hot dirt.
I thought that maybe you could relate, and I know that many of our experiences are a little more “cereal” than we let on.
Xoxo,
Kelly Stone is an educator, comedian, mother, and author who loves the heck outta the river. She welcomes e-letters at kellystone.org or kellystonecomedy@gmail. com and adores handwritten notes and postcards via good ol’ snail mail.
