March 16 - Breakfast

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. As such, one just shouldn't mess with it. I'm perfectly willing to be experimental at dinner, less so at lunch and pretty much completely unwilling to have anything non-traditional at breakfast. I've eaten fresh un-cooked squid sliced off the still moving animal in front of me for dinner, but ask me to east a piece of broiled salmon for breakfast and it just is not going to happen.

This has been a bit of a challenge in the past when traveling internationally. Other cultures do not properly share my narrow view as to what constitutes appropriate breakfast fare. Finding scrambled eggs and toast in France or Italy was not merely a challenge, it was impossible. Forget a stack of pancakes. I settled for coffee and a danish which probably isn't actually Danish. In Japan, they generally provide international restaurants at the hotels which is a good thing because what passes for breakfast in Japan isn't much different than what passes for dinner.

That said, even the familiar can be unfamiliar. The Japanese have a penchant for under-cooking things. I've eaten sushi for 30 years, but was still floored to learn that they serve chicken sushi in Japan. Chicken sushi. What North-American doesn't have a salmonella fueled gut-wrenching fear of chicken just a little pink in the center let alone completely raw? As a result, expect that, no matter how hard you try to communicate that you want your scrambled eggs done well, that they will be runny.

Across all the cultures I've had the privilege to visit, about the only constant is coffee. Before I started traveling for business, I never drank coffee. At the first conference I attended they did not have my beloved cold Diet Coke as my preferred source of wakey-wakey. They had coffee in those giant brass containers with spigots. It didn't appear to be killing any of the other attendees and I really needed caffeine that morning so I had poured a cup and had a sip. Then I added four packets of sugar.

Unlike Diet Coke in the morning, Coffee is universally available, thank goodness, though some is better than others. With beer and coffee, I always wonder what it is about the bitterness that people seem to like. I've had varieties of both that avoid the bitterness and like that much better. Fortunately for me, sweetener is always available, though occasionally disdained, for coffee to take the bitter edge off. Because of this, I learned to like Italian coffee the best. Italians feel no shame as they drop a tablespoon of sugar into about two tablespoons of coffee. And then scrape out the sugar granules and eat them when the liquid is gone.

The upshot is that, while I still won't experiment with breakfast, much, I had to adopt completely unfamiliar fare to constitute my minimal get-started requirements. So now I drink coffee (almost) like a normal person.