Photo by Daniel Hayduk
It was Friday: the end of a long week at work, and one of those days where one cup of coffee with breakfast just isn’t enough.
Because I had a long break between classes, I decided to take a quick run to the local cafe for a pick-me-up.
Deducing that attempting to carry a hot cup of coffee on my bicycle was going to be an epic failure, I opted to spend a few thousand shillings for a bajaji to drive me to the coffee shop and back.
The bajaji dropped me at the door (no drive-through here!) and I went inside to order a large house brew and a large cappuccino to go.
The woman at the counter informed me that I would have to get only a single unless I wanted each coffee in two cups, as they only carried one size of disposable cups for carryout.
I acquiesced and shortly had two small steaming cups: neither cup was made of an insulating material, nor were the lids a good fit.
The lids merely sat on top of the cups, being far too large for the cup.
I carefully carried the coffees out to the bajaji, where I set them on the floor to shake the burning sensation from my hands. No wonder Starbucks has those cool little cardboard insulators for their cups!
Immediately, while attempting to hold the cups upright without burning myself, the bajaji hit the first of many bumps in the rough dirt road, and coffee splashed across the floor.
Deciding that the coffee-on-the-floor method was not going to work, I tenderly picked up each cup with my very practiced egg-and-spoon method from equine gymkhana games, and tried not to yelp as we proceeded back to school, the scalding coffee melding the cups to my hands.
By time I arrived back to school, one of the lids had blown off, there was coffee spilled across the floor of the bajaji, and my fingers were irrecoverably burnt, but I had coffee.
So much for a “quick coffee run.”