Blood tests and coffee – a cheap morning

April 28th, 2010

We find a coffee shop in a million. We’ll be back!
Today was our annual check-up day, our 100,000 mile service, this year’s medical milestone, whatever you like to call it. We live in the downtown area of a small town where most things are in walking distance and our car rests in its underground parking slot. We walked across to the HMO building, took numbers and sat waiting for our turn to come up. A few needle pricks, some weak jokes from the doctors and we were done. Now we come to the important part of the day – breakfast.

The coffee shop
The coffee shop, grandly named “English Cake”, consists of small round tables with plastic chairs set out on a strip of sidewalk under large shady trees on the busiest intersection in town. There is constant tooting of horns at double-park offenders, slow pedestrians, slow cars, a yelling newspaper vendor and the all-pervading background chatter of coffee drinkers and waitresses trying to get the orders right. But it looked inviting and we grabbed a table that became vacant as we approached.

Breakfast
Our blood tests had required fasting and we were hungry. We ordered Cappuccinos, a large for me and a small for my wife, and one large egg-salad sandwich to share in Ciabatta bread. This is a rustic, oblong, flat bread whose name means “slipper” in Italian. The egg salad consisted of hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, egg-plant, lettuce and other green stuff which I couldn’t identify. The sandwich, cut in half, arrived with a large bowl of tomato and onion salad with a jug of dressing. We tucked in and ate everything.

Noise
The noise was horrific and is one of the reasons we have stayed away from this particular coffee shop. The Cappuccinos are plain looking and are not decorated with little cedar trees in the top layer of milk as they are in the fancy designer coffee shops. The coffee was hot and good. The sandwich was delicious.

The cost
Restaurants and coffee shops are great places to be while there is food and drink waiting to be consumed. Then the bill arrives and undoes some of the pleasure. In the case of the coffee shop this morning it looked like this:
One small Cappuccino: $2.43,
One large Cappuccino: $2.70,
One egg-salad sandwich: $6.50,
Total: $11.63.
The tip brought it to $13.50, an outright bargain. We will be back there again and again, despite the noise and the traffic.

The end of the day
So far the day was going well but from time to time I had flutters about the test results. I hadn’t bothered to ask how long it would be before results arrived and I assumed 2 to 3 days. At exactly 13:13 I was in front of the computer when an email came rushing in with all the results. Apart from one or two slightly over or under numbers, everything was fine. A great end to a great day!

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