Bad MARTA, good Fantasy Beverages
I've not made it a secret that I live near the Kensington MARTA station, and I travel through there on a fairly irregular basis.
Lately, they have been undergoing a thoroughly mystifying infrastructure upgrade. They are resurfacing the bus intake area, where the buses drop off and pick up passengers. This means they've had to create a completely separate bus transfer area.
They did a pretty good job of crafting a bus shelter out of PVC pipe and plastic sheeting. They sunk PVC pipe into buckets of cement, and used those as the supports for the structure. They kitbashed a single line as a support for the top. All of this was set up in an adjacent parking lot.
The asphault in this area is abysmal, however. I don't know enough about things like asphault, so I can't really tell you what is wrong with it. Suffice it to say that the surface in the parking lot is eroding away at an alarming rate. In order to address this problem, many large steel plates have been put down over the surface wounds of the parking lot. You've seen these plates in cities covering potholes. They look as though they would make great armor for personnel carriers as well. Anyway, the net effect of these plates is that the bus sways like a schooner on the high seas whenever the driver drives over them. It is a sensation one is not accustomed to when riding a bus, but it is an interesting feeling nonetheless.
All this to say this: whomever got the contract to originally surface this parking lot must've been related to someone important. That's all I have to say about that.
I am constantly and continuously surprised at the total lack of entrepreneurship in and around train stations here. Why doesn't MARTA have little kiosks for people to have a cup of coffee or whatnot while they wait for their train?
Of course, I've been stuck on a train a few times with some individual who had liberally interpreted the gray area between "Transporting Food" and "Consuming it on the Train," so I understand the urge to not make food and drink too available. However, for the most part, the land around most train stops is mostly devoid of restaurants. There are a few notable exceptions, and I'm going to post a link to this really cool website that talks about those exceptions.
I remember when I was living in New York that there was this coffee stand on the street. All you had to do is have a dollar bill ready, walk up to the window, say, "Cream and sugar" and hand them the dollar bill. Or two dollars, I can't remember how much it was, but it was a fairly negligible amount of money. This was a very cool, simplified business. They took beans and water and made coffee. They sold the product plus dairy and sugar, and no BS. If you wanted this stuff, you would go to that window, you would get it. There were no lattes, no half-cafs, no double-cafs, no mochacinno java chips. This was serious coffee for serious people who wanted to get it fast. You could obtain coffee in just about as much time as it took to decide to get some. In fact, if you were walking down the street and saw the coffee stand you could just turn that direction with money in your hand and, in mere seconds, be on your way with a fairly amazingly perfect cup of coffee. Now, realistically these guys did not care about coffee prep technique and I would hate to see the interiors of their urns, but the coffee was good, hot, relatively fresh, and not too bitter. And it was frickin' fast.
That's what I want. Coffee that's a heartbeat away. Not to put down my little French press, which is super delicious, but really, having someone else go to the trouble is very compelling.
That reminds me. I have been thinking about the kind of beverages people find in fantasy and science fiction, the wakeful beverages of those genres specifically. The Liaden books have a lot to do with wine and tea. These people drink an awful lot of wine, and they seem to also imbide a great deal of specific kinds of tea. Really, what you drink in the Liadenverse is very important. It's almost like it's a mini-personality test: are they going to choose the red, the white, or the green? And the fact that the nasty bad Liaden traders make their crew drink fake coffee....*shudder*. That tells you everything you need to know about their inherent evil.
And coffee is a big theme in the stories of Nathan Lowell, Quarter / Half / Full Share, etc. It's coffee making that sets our young Ishmael apart from his crewmates.
In the fantasy realm, klava is a drink that seems to be based on hungarian coffee, the preparation and ingredients of which are not to be believed, really. It is intriguing, however, and I think I might like to try it someday when I have regular coffee close at ready hand and I want to waste some ingredients.
I've made some reference in my gaming and my fiction to some special drinks, but I have not yet put down any recipes. There is a hot Amishkan drink called kafva or kav, which is of course very much like coffee. The Lunargenti and Sydalians love their cider, hard or soft. Distilling alcohols is a favorite pastime of alchemists and sorcerers, and places where magical people are welcomed will have these spirits in bars and the like. I've yet to come up with something truly fantastic, however.
All this talk about drink is making me thirsty. I wonder if there are any fantasy or science fiction drinks I'm missing? Ok, yes, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Anything else?
Note: Since I first wrote this, it has been announced that MARTA will possibly start doing concessions in some of their stations. More on that as it develops.
News, Random | SambearPoet | 
April 21, 2009 5:50 pm | 
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