Brazilian coffee just plain blows

It's true. As much as I like to tout all the things I like about this place, there's a cultural and logical black hole smack dab wherever they started to think about drinking coffee around here. Which is kind of weird, since as I was reading last night in A Death in Brazil, coffee was one of the, or maybe even the only (I was tired) major crops that the Portuguese and Spanish profited from in the years after dividing up South America between themselves.

In Salvador people drink black coffee, relatively strong but not terribly strong by US standards, out of these little plastic cups that are like the ones that come with a bottle of cough syrup. And they put lots of sugar in it. Soooo ... I say to myself, What's so great about that? And the answer is: Nothing. Drinking a "cup" of coffee here (called cafezinho, "little coffee") makes me approximately 1/16th as happy as I would be if I drank what I consider to be a normal sized coffee. And of course you can't walk into a luncheonette and be like "I'd like 16 cafezinhos please, and my friend here will have an additional 16 cafezinhos, and we'd like 1 more group of 16 cafezinhos to go (ignorant tourist smile)." There are some places here that serve large cups of coffee, but they cater to tourists, so going there makes you feel like ... a tourist. And there's also places that serve espresso European-style but again going there makes me feel the same as when I'm buying "authentic" New York paraphernalia (a 6" tall plastic Statue of Liberty") at a Times Square shop, of which there are approximately 1000, and all their stuff is made by slave children in some Beijing suburb.

So my coffee maker is this little one-cup deal (I'll try to post a picture here) that is iron, cup-sized, and has a little hook-shaped tube going over the top of it that looks sort of like a little faucet. You put water in the bottom (enough for a cafezinho glass ... sigh), coffee in the part of the cap that has a metal filter, and screw the top on and put your cup on the top. You put the whole thing with the cup on the stove, turn on the gas, and ... there's no pilot light.

That's right. I had all this set up last night, and was looking forward to placating my pre-caffeine buzz anxiety/exhilaration when I realized that I needed a match or lighter to light the gas stove. There's a lighter on the fridge which is of course spent (thank you landlady), so I had to go walk like 5 blocks to find a place where they sell lighters. And of course my Portuguese sucks so no one knows what I'm talking about ("luz para fumar?" is what I said), and the fact that I'm gesturing frantically like a heroin addict in withdrawal is not helping either. Finally I get one at a gas station, trudge back to my place, start up the stove, and hide behind my fridge while I'm watching the thing heat up, because I'm not sure I set it up right and I want to be protected in case it explodes.

So when it came out, quite anticlimactically, I drank it in approximately 0.03 seconds, which is 10x as much time as it took to put sugar in, and thought to myself, only 15 more to go.