I was starting to feel sick on my diet of caffeine and carbs. I’ve literally just been eating $1 bread from Chinatown and drinking bubble tea and coffee. After a beautiful day at Menagerie Coffee and Bodhi Coffee, Victoria and I made a pitstop at Kungfu Tea in Chinatown before heading back home. That SEPTA ride back was a struggle. I was clutching my stomach the whole way. I proposed, suppose tomorrow we just stay on campus instead of making another day of cafe crawling. I recalled Ami said she wanted to go for a swim, and boy did a swim sound good. You know you’ve gone too far when exercise becomes an appealing idea.
Anyways, I mused, wouldn’t it be fun to swim for four hours just because I could? So that was my plan for the next day.
Sometime in the middle of the swim I realized, wait I still have all this time left in the day. Who’s to say that I can’t swim and get a bit of cafe crawling into my schedule as well?
After a quick search on Yelp, Ami, Victoria, and I made our way to Plenty Cafe. The search was quick but the journey was not. Or maybe we just kept getting distracted. We saw so many cute little corner cafes along the way. Places so small they probably wouldn’t be great places to sit and work at all afternoon, but they’d be good for hanging out chatting with friends. By the time we arrived at Plenty Cafe, it was dark (which made photography a pain in the butt).
After half an hour of photos with my camera, documenting it on Snapchat was up next. The work I hauled all the way to the coffee shop with me? That could wait.
Ami doesn’t like working in coffee shops, so she didn’t bring any work with her, and instead she brought her hot chocolate to the windowsill to “people watch.” (I got an iced chai latte; Plenty Cafe is now perhaps my favourite place in Philly to get an iced chai latte, right up along with Hothouse Coffee.) As she got settled down, I went outside to get more shots of Plenty Cafe. I saw Ami through the windowsill people watching, so I went up to say hi, except that she was on her phone. So the obvious thing to do was stand in front of her at the windowsill and make silly faces until she noticed me, which took five minutes. I sure gave her a fright! And it was wonderful. Worth the wait. Mission accomplished.
As I was snapping away, Jennifer sent a text to warn me that our usual train back (the one we took here) wasn’t operating.
Wait wat.
Are we stranded in the city?!
We frantically checked online, and according to the SEPTA Twitter, “service remains suspended due to Amtrak power problems,” which meant we’d have to find an alternate way home. Oh geez, I had just gotten used to the SEPTA train system. If you know me, you know I get travel anxiety (not REALLY anxiety but I get anxious), but only especially when I’m traveling alone, and since I was with Ami and Victoria, I held it together. I’m a lot more comfortable traveling with people, because if we get lost, at least we’re all lost [together]. I feel that way when a car approaches me on the road too: if I get hit by a car, at least we’ll all get hit. YUP. Also hit me with your car because this.
Phew-ey!! To think I almost called it a day after my swim when I had an adventure like this waiting in store for me! Roaming the city, making our way to Plenty Cafe, making it back (yeah we made it back!)… So I guess not much really happened, but emotions were riding high. And anyway, it’s not about things but about how things make you feel, and all that jazz.
Today I learned that there’s always time for cafe crawling. Even if you’ve spent a good portion of the day swimming away your whiles. Today is not yet over. If you didn’t start at the beginning, the middle is a fine place to start; it’s better than no start at all! So what if you had a crappy/unproductive/no-good morning? Today is not yet over; you can still turn it around or even start fresh. I mean, my morning swim was pretty fantastic. Plenty Cafe was just the cherry on top.
tl;dr– There’s always time for cafe crawling. Got stranded by SEPTA for a little while but made it back. Perhaps my fav place for an iced chai latte, along with Hothouse.