Self-referential coffee pot
Venice’s waiters are snappy
It’s been a long night. It began with a fruitless and increasingly desperate search for accomodation. My friend E enjoys her luxury, and during the last ten days we’ve stayed in nicer places than I am used to, but as we drive east away from Toulon and the cluster of conurbation with its attendant hotels, B&Bs, and various other potential roofs-over-our-heads, we are willing to settle for anything. Everybody in Europe is on vacation and on the road, and after several hours of following promising signs off the main road only to be greeted by yet another complet sign, it is looking like we’re sleeping in the Golf. We’re already well sick of the Golf after the last 800 km in baking Mediterranean heat.
Screwed.
Until! Le Municipal Camping appears in our headlight beams. We creep between the chipped concrete gateposts in first gear and make a slow circuit, headlights silhouetting sagging pup-tents and damp bathing suits on clotheslines. The sites are small, sandy, crammed together. And full. Every damn one of them.
We want to weep with frustration and road-exhaustion. We started the morning in Barcelona and have been melting like candles in the non-AC-having Golf for 12 hours now. My legs are numb. I am just about to give in to the call of sobbing self-pity when E points out that site 12a is not actually occupied; it is just so small and so cheek-by-jowl with 12 that it appears to be full. In we pull.
Through Slovenia, Italy, France, Spain, and France again we’ve been lugging a tent and sleeping pads and bags, and suddenly we are damn happy about it. We set the tent up in seconds and toast le municipal camping with our last bottle of warm white from Bize Minervois.
Between the exhaustion of the drive, the wine, and the hard knobby municipal ground, we awake feeling not so fresh. The Golf’s tank is on E (the gauge marker, not my traveling companion), so our first order of business, even before coffee, is to find some gas.
Filling up a few minutes later I look around and notice E has disappeared. Then I spot her across the road, snapping a photo of a random sign outside a café.
“What’s so interesting about that café in particular?” I ask when she returns.
mascot — cannibal
or just drowsy?
“Look,” E says. He’s a POT of coffee drinking a CUP of coffee. This raises all kinds of questions. For example, where did the coffee come from? Did he pour it out of his own HEAD?”
My own head began to spin. I imagined a never-ending loop of coffee flowing out of, back into, and back out of this coffee pot. Honestly, it didn’t make me particularly want a cup of coffee. But we remained intrigued, and began to photograph the thing wherever he turned up. It turns out that Hausbrandt, aside from being excellent coffee, is produced in Trieste, just down the road from me, but I’d never noticed that the logo mascot was a CANNIBAL before. “Maybe he’s not actually a cannibal,” E later allowed (you can see that she thought about this a lot on this trip). “Maybe he’s just ’self-referential’.'” And later, “Perhaps the best thing about this fellow is that he seems so radiantly happy to be drinking a cup of himself.”
E’s pictures are copyrighted so I haven’t used them, but you can go and see them. Here’s the original café picture; and there’s this one taken in Ljubljana of me holding up a sugar packet with the logo on it.
The Hausbrandt logo is not the only self-referential advertising out there; not long later my brother and I discovered a cannibalistic wild boar about to tuck into a dish of gulaš made from himself at a restaurant atop Vogel, and another self-referential pig served as a main topic of conversation over the first drink I shared with the girl I would later marry.
If memory serves, some vaguely torrential rain began not long after we’d pitched the tent a la Municipal Camping and swigged some unchilled white. (Let us not even speak of dinner, as I believe there was none to speak of.) I believe we managed to stay dry, though–or else I’m just making this whole rain thing up.
Also, according to notes you made in my trusty travel journal, “As we set up tent, E says, ‘We will be discussing the irony of this shortly.’” I can’t say for sure what was ironic about the situation, though it may have been the fact that one of our main reasons for opting out of Benicassim was an extraordinarily high probability that we’d have to camp there. If so, ironic indeed.
Comment by Emily — Thursday 4 August 05 @ 04.28 MDT+2.00
Hmm, E, I’m not sure about the rain. I suppose it’s possible that I would not remember it, but being in a tent you do tend to notice these things, whether you stay dry or not (and it’s a pretty good tent for that). And I think you’re exactly right about the source of the irony — we weren’t into the idea of being all sweaty and having to deal with camping. Both of which came to pass, ironically.
Comment by sgazzetti — Thursday 4 August 05 @ 20.21 MDT+2.00
a self-sustaining sentient being, this coffee-pot is.
Comment by Max Coston — Thursday 13 October 05 @ 01.30 MDT+2.00
[...] dow promotion Magda photographed in Poland. Previous cannibalistic shills were pictured on August 2nd and August 25th. Another questionable marketing gambit was discussed back on the ides of March. The last [...]
Pingback by isoglossia — main » Pull this — Sunday 20 August 06 @ 16.37 MDT+2.00
I believe that’s a recursive coffee pot, not a cannibalistic one (it’s not drinking a coffee pot, it’s drinking coffee, so it’s more like Kevin Costner in Water World, which I’d really rather not think about).
I would like to know what the terminating condition is, however…
Comment by Kate — Friday 22 June 07 @ 18.52 MDT+2.00