Chipped Coffee...MMMMMMM!

[channamasala]

This is a letter I just sent to my best friend/ex-roommate (Roddy has met him!). I am only putting it here because my Hotmail account tends to lose things I save, which sort of defeats the purpose of saving, and I'm using Mozilla for the time being and my weblog doesn't like Mozilla and I can't enter anything without going into a special site, which is unavailable right now. So I'm putting it here for future copy/pasting. Enjoy!

Hey Brendan,

I just want to thank you for the high-grade coffee bean chipper that you left us in the apartment. I've never had finer tasting chipped coffee before. When the jagged, half-bean sized shards shrieked and scratched their way through the grinding apparatus, I knew I was in for a quality coffee-drinking experience. I was, however, left wondering, if putting the grind setting to the highest level of "fine" meant tasty, sumptuous chipped coffee, what the coarser settings would give me (perhaps coffee beans that came out, as if by magic, actually larger and coarser than they had been going in?). The soul-stealing beverage experience left me reminsicing of the good old days in Olde Armenia, when I would relax each morning on the back verandah watching the peacocks play around the base of Mount Ararat, and my Nanna would come out carrying in her soft, elderly hands a fresh, steaming, succulent cup of the finest coffee, chipped with her own two hands with a broken and rusty hammer before put in a glass jar and shaken with hot water to produce such caffeinated excellence. It's as if I had my own legion of wine-making grape-crushers dancing atop coffee beans, rather than grapes, to produce for me the finest in chipped, trachea-tearing coffee beanefficence, except instead of hitting forcefully with their feet, they instead pranced lightly in padded slippers like the most silken and featherlight of fairies. And as I drank my cup of coffee, made all the more mouthwateringly grandiose by the accumulated patina of tastes of a coffeemaker that, in order to produce the finest in aged coffee stain taste excellence, was not cleaned in at least two years as recommended by the most expert of coffeeologists.

Cheers, and I really do miss you,

Jenna

[smithsgj]

And as you drank your cup of coffee, made all the more ... yes? what happened as you drank your cup of coffee, made all the more ...

Here is how to translate into Chinese:

coffee zhuanjia recommend every two years clean coffeemaker. If not clean coffeemaker, have stain. Very old stain tastes good, many old stains da you zai, jiu yindao taste de patina de accumulation, geng mouthwatering, geng grandiose, yinyong shi jiu juede zui lixiang, zui wanmei, shifen meiwei de hao kafei dou.

Small chunks and work logically backwards (that's the way the language works in Indo-European terms, nothing to do with Chinese brains so don't anyone start).

[channamasala]

...what happened was that I threw out the brewed coffee - it was disgusting - scrubbed the entire coffeemaker and then mashed the coffee shards in my mortar and pestle, purchased from Eden Supermarket in Seven Corners (a giant supermarket of nothing but Asian food and cooking accessories far cheaper and better than any Safeway or Giant's Asian section...this is a whole store of it! There's even still bugs in the rice!) for the grinding of Indian spices by hand, and brewed drinkable coffee with that.

Brendan replies:

Hey Jenna,

To be frank I'm astonished that thing works at all after a year of (I assume) sitting there unused. But I'm totally pleased that it's still grinding the beans the way I liked them. Just as I like my coffee grounds moistened a bit when I choose to have ground coffee, I like to have my coffee beans softened a bit by the machine's feeble whirly blades before I eat my whole bean coffee. Any other way is a bit hard on the teeth.

Hey, it could be worse. My roommate moved out and took the coffee maker with him. Now I'm reduced to using a large vat of instant coffee I bought back in, like, March, am only halfway finished with, and which I predict will never go bad. I will of course leave it to my current roommate when I leave at the end of June.

Enjoy your coffee - and I do miss you too,

Brendan

[satkoj]

Great creative writing skills. Thanks!