Parents back

01.05.2003

I don't have a car anymore. My parents got back from their trip to Bolivia yesterday, so I drove my mom's car back to Saginaw to give it back to them. Mom and Dad had a great time visiting family in Santa Cruz. They also built a a church w/ a delegation from their own church.

I got some nice gifts on their return. I have a Bolivian coffee maker. This is great, though it also makes me wonder where I can get more Bolivian coffee from. See, Bolivian coffee is a very, very dark roast. The coffee maker (or distiller) works like a combination drip coffee maker and espresso machine. Coffee (tightly packed) goes into a small metal strainer and is placed into the pot. Hot water is then poured over it and let sit for at least an hour, the water slowly filtering down through the finely ground coffee. The resulting coffee doesn't look or taste like espresso, and is actually darker. Most Bolivians drink it mixed - half coffee (we call it "coffee tint") and half water or condensed milk. It's smooth and very bold. Really, the best coffee in the world. It's so dark (pitch black actually), that when you mix it w/ a half cup of condensed milk, it's coloring looks like regular coffee w/ a bit less than one little creamer packet in it.

I got back to Kalamazoo on a Greyhound bus. It was better than I'd expected. The only bad thing was that I hadn't brought a book to read. I borrowed my dad's copy of Tom Clancy's Power Plays: Cutting Edge. Surprise, surprise. It wasn't written by Clancy at all. It was a story "created" by Clancy and Martin Greenberg (who?) but the book was written by someone else (Jerome Preisler). Huh? I got halfway through it (about 200 pages) during the trip, but I still don't care about any of the characters. Yeah, it's a pretty pointless book.

Well, that was it for today. I hung out w/ Dan and discussed future plans (we both like the idea of owning our own businesses). It was really a great day. Simpson's in the evening (another amazing episode) and a vegan potluck at night.

Posted by Miguel at 11:49 PM