Oh, but I have to tell a story of the UNIVERSE's best coffee.

Picture this: Burma, early 80's, pre-dawn and freezing but you have to bare your feet to enter the temple, where we'd been told the party started for the annual mendicant monk alms-giving, when ALL the men and boys who happen to be monks that year in the whole country come to be given something. We'd been misled - the predawn hour was when all the women and girls in the village started cooking in their own homes, but we didn't know that yet - so we sat in a corner of a room where there were some monks sitting on the floor around a big, low table where scuttling acolytes were attempting to rush into and out bearing food for the table, all while not letting their heads be higher than the heads of the sitting monks, so it was quite a show, which the monks completely ignored, and we waited for things to start happening. Then at one point the acolytes kind of all scuttled in, lifted the table between them all, and then set it back down, at which point the monks began eating. It ws really neat to see, especially with the heads-lower bit. But then one of the monks started yelling at the acolytes and gesturing toward us, so we figured we were busted and would have to leave, or worse take our freezing feet out of my companion's purse, but then instead one of the acolytes came running over to us... with coffee.

It had chicory or something in it, and brown sugar, and condensed milk or something, it was thick and hot and sweet...

...and it was by far the most delicious coffee (or anythhing, for that matter) either of us (and she was French!) had ever, ever had, since of course we had gotten no coffee yet getting up at 3 am with no room service...

Man. I wish I could taste it again, and find out what was in it.

The alms-giving was interesting, too: all day (from like 11 am on!) a wavering line of monks of all ages (note being a Buddhist monk isn't a life decision until you're older but you have to be one for a total of 2 years before turning 18, so you do it a few months at a time starting from very little) wandered through the center of town where each was handed something that we gather was supposed to get them through the year. Each family member from the village apparently contributed something, so some monks got big things that were hard to carry and apparently contained many foodstuffs and other items, and others were handed little pots with a single plant in it or something, and that was that, luck of the draw for however long it had taken you to walk from wherever in Burma you were to Pagan, which has more temples per square inch than anything I've ever seen, they're like haystacks at harvest time or something. We just happened to visit that day, too, since Burma didn't advertise such things.

But that coffee lives on in my dreams.