Shokoofeh Mostofi

Pen name: Blossom
Job Title: Customer Service Manager
Languages: Farsi – English

My First Impression in a New City

High adrenaline was driving me through the lobbies of the airport. I had not slept in more than 24 hours.
Having left the bag containing all our immigration documents in Frankfurt during the layover between the 2 flights had added to all the anxiety of arrival in a new city and a new country.
The mood in which I was though not only upon my arrival but long after had nothing to do with the mood of the city I had landed in.
If I could use only one adjective to describe Vancouver, I would say “relaxed”.
People jogging on the streets at 8:00 on weekday mornings, going to work wearing sneakers, and the most weird of all the coffee culture.
The coffee culture here is something you can write about pages and pages and not yet do it justice.
Previously my closest encounter with coffee was through instant coffee and of course Turkish coffee once in a blue moon. My staple drink was tea.

Here though I felt myself surrounded by coffee, banks, offices, stores! Don’t get me wrong, I loved the aroma but to me it looked like people could easily swim in pools of coffee the way they were consuming it. Why would people sip coffee as they walked or drove to work? How could they sit in coffee shops and pay 5 times more for just one cup, can’t they make it at home? Do they not have homes?
Soon I started noticing the patience with which people stood in lines and waited their turns, be it a
supermarket or a bank. No one was nagging or begging others to let them go first as if they had all the time in the world and there was nothing more pleasurable than to stand in line. For a while I thought cars here came without horns because within the first couple of months in Vancouver not even once I had heard a honk. Maybe they blinked when I wasn’t looking because their lights were on all day. Then I had an epiphany, it must be because of coffee.
Well, when in Rome do as Romans do. After my next trip to the garage sale I was the proud owner of coffee maker. It took me some time to be able to drink one full cup and not get jittery or lose sleep for a couple of nights but i am no longer a stranger to coffee and neither to the city.