I hope you're having a nice month ☕️

October is the month of harvest and witches, both happy topics, haha, but it's also the month of coffee, and I must say I've drunk more coffee than ever during the last days, perhaps because I need to keep my eyes wide open these days, as we witches work so much more than the rest of the year, right?

I think the photo below is really festive, as festive as you can ask me at least, haha, and with that I should call it a celebration for #ICD2025. Those people you see with me are my former Lit students. I treated them to coffee and empanadas in a nice café in my hometown, Café con Bracamonte, though I had no idea we had to celebrate ICD--we did it anyway; I guess it counts!

Resorting to a dishonest rhetorical device here by way of preterition, I'll say that I'm grateful not to have to talk about October 1st as the start of the a Christmas season that only exists in the imagination of our national government and those who play our own awful Venezuelan version of play pretend.

So International Coffee Day.

The view from this café are always relaxing. I took the photo and GIF below sometime in early August this year.

A few meters away, near the State Government Building (Sucre, Venezuela), about ten years ago, a friend took the photo I use here on my Hive profile--I'll change it when José Gregorio Hernández performs another miracle I've been waiting for, even when I'm not a believer--. It's as if time has frozen, even though the coffee is still hot. God, the coffee here is always hot. Maybe that's why we don't realize that time is passing? The trees won't lose their green, nor the sun its brightness. There's a reason why the Caribbean Sea bathes us after all, I believe.

Inside, you'll find young, charismatic cashiers and waiters. The place is decorated with coffee paraphernalia; everything is nice and unpretentious. We had a nice chat over delicious coffee made with beans they bring from Caripe, some of the finest in the country.

They have this wall I really liked. It's full of photos of personalities who, along with hot coffee, are part of the city's identity, of Cumana's cultural heritage. The last one at the bottom right is in keeping with these witching dates; it's

El Diablo de Cumaná

(the Devil of Cumana), Luis del Valle Osorio, who passed away about four years ago at 89. On a corner that I can see from these windows, near the coffee shop I often visited when I was younger, I was part of one of the most striking theatrical experiences in my hometown. I met El Diablo. I saw him that close only once when I was 6 or 7 years old--never wanted to come that close again though what I saw him do fascinated me big time.

He had a terrifying street act that he performed during Carnival: a dirty, ragged child lay on the ground, meekly awaiting sacrifice, while he threatened him with his infernal dance, as he showed us the audience his awful face and movements from very, very close... He poked the little kid with his trident; his sight lost of this world, the child sweated and breathed heavily as if in a trance, and the trident seemed to pierce him slowly. There was blood, for me, as terrible as if it was real. Oh, that was some act, culture made under the scorching sun, among the terrified faces of old and young. A medieval tropical feeling. You felt like you were not suppossed to have seen that. Amazing, mystical, scaring. You changed after that.

I went back in time through all these memories, coffee memories somehow, as I used to drink coffee around here most days of the week, when the map of the historical center was a little different and names were different, when I was younger and had teachers instead of students, and we got our hands dirty with the colorful annatto oil from the empanadas, which back then were much smaller, I must say.

Coffee was also smaller and more simple; you had a negrito, con leche o marron. Now we get these jumbo cups and jumbo empanadas. My students ordered caramel coffee and frappccino.

I was happy about the enormousness of my cappuccino.

Wherever this world is going, I'm glad we still have coffee and empanadas anyway.

I hope you had a

Happy Coffee International Day!

All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.

Thank you so much for your visit :)

Banner by @andresromero 🖤