Cafe and Egg Honey-- the Dream symbol of Childhood

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Watching the black-and-white movie Peter the Great made by the Soviet Union in the early years, there was a scene in which an old Russian aristocratic family had breakfast. His father instructed the whole family to learn to drink a drink called coffee. Peter the Great instructed the aristocracy to learn from Western Europe. It is clear that coffee has become one of the indicators of civilization. It is said that the first caf é in Taiwan may be the Lion of the Park, which was opened in Taipei's New Park in 1912. Some writers and historians have also proposed that, according to newspaper advertisements, "Xiyang Xuan" appeared outside the west gate of Taipei in 1897. This is the earliest. As for the first cafe opened by Taiwanese, I read in Chen Ruoyi's book that we would have to wait until "Witt" in Taiping Town, Taipei City in 1931.

I don't know when the first coffee shop in Kaohsiung appeared, but I remember that my first cup of black coffee without sugar and milk was a "foreign meat" opened in the first or second year of high school. Before, I only drank a large box of Nestle three-in-one coffee that my mother bought at home to refresh me with K-books, which was so sweet that the pores all over my body were open. But when I was younger, I had already been to the cafe. I like it there.

It was set up near my earliest residence in Kaohsiung. On Ershenger Road, there are wooden frame doors, square corner glass, halo yellow lights, and the color of the wood bar is steady. The seat in front of the bar is a wooden ring chair of similar color. The back of the chair is filled with sponge wrapped in Tihua cloth, which is quite European, or rather, it has the European flavor that children can imagine as much as possible in the 1980s. Just looking in from the outside, it is enough to have a sense of strangeness, the surrounding shops are all blue and white Sapporo fluorescent lights, who will decorate that kind of sweet tone yellow light. It was not children's territory. It was the father who came to drink and carried me like a small animal.

When my father sat there, waiting for the boss to make coffee from the round-bellied siphon pot, he would usually order a cup for me. Black coffee itself has a sense of adulthood (in Japanese TV programs, all those who add wine or coffee are said to be adult flavor), which is not in tune with little girls, and adults may also worry about bitter taste, caffeine and so on. The yellowish juice is poured out of the shaker and filled into a glass in the shape of a tulip bud, with a little white foam on the top, a glass mixing rod and a colored straw. Ah, it's delicious, cold and thick, even though I have no idea how this drink is made. The stature is not tall enough. You usually have to take off your leather shoes, climb into a chair, or even kneel on a chair to drink, which is a little taller than sitting, so that it is not easy to drop the glass.

Besides the cafe, I drank egg honey in another place. My father worked as a bartender for a short time. My mother was not satisfied with the upside-down schedule day and night, but she also took me to the bar to visit my father. This time, my father was the one at the bar, and the wine shaker was like a huge star in the palm of his hand. The bar bar is also much higher than the cafe bar, the chair is not a comfortable armchair, but a plastic leather-colored, rotating high chair; of course, my father also made a cup of egg honey for me, and the edge of the cup was decorated with a round of thin, transparent lemon slices, and sometimes a small paper umbrella was inserted, probably to make my daughter happy. After my father left home, I accidentally dug up the big black leather notepad left by my father from the cupboard at home, full of notes from learning to mix drinks, with clear steps and pictures and texts.

In fact, it was not until the moment of writing that I finally checked the ingredients of egg honey-egg yolk, orange juice, lemon juice, honey-there are eggs and honey! I always drink egg honey when I am with my father. Somehow, I was not curious about the raw materials at all, probably because it was not important. Its color is as soft as duckling feathers, very compatible with the wooden bar, embedded in the childhood scene is a dream symbol, does not need, or can no longer come true.