missing things

When I was in New Zealand I missed several American things: Dr Pepper, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Gilmore Girls, cheap shampoo, Target, Gap jeans, Girl Scout cookies, and drinks from Starbucks that weren't prohibitively expensive. However, now that I'm back US, I find myself missing the things I used to replace the things I missed back then.

I wrote more than a year ago about the coffee shops in Wellington, and how I was getting used to drinking plain mochas rather than fancy sugary things from Starbucks (not that mochas aren't sugary, just slightly less so).

Well, at work the other day we took a break and drove down to the nearby Starbucks and came back with some wonderfully sugary drinks. But as I stood in line at Starbucks, waiting to order, I found myself thinking wistfully of the days when I would take the elevator down ten stories, brave the Wellington wind and hurry twenty feet up the street to the trendy and modern MoJo Cafe, where one person would stay at the counter and order all our drinks while the rest of us would gather around a square table and look around the small dark cafe to see who else from the Ministry of Health was taking a coffee break. One of the guys would generally order some ridiculously strong coffee in a tiny green cup and we would marvel at the size of the thing and chat about work and traveling and life, and I would enjoy my mocha in the glass tumbler, playing with the two slowly melting marshmallows—one pink, one white.

Now that I'm back, I wonder why I ever missed Starbucks.