Spending an afternoon drinking coffee at a sidewalk cafe with good company or a good book is all I ever want to do, and to do it here in Piazza San Marco at Caffè Florian with an orchestra behind me was a dream.

Reading Terminal Market is a huge indoor farmer’s market in Philly, and it has not one but two Old City Coffee vendors. Why? I have no idea. They’re conveniently located though; Reading Terminal Market is right above the SEPTA station. But today we didn’t check out either of them. Instead, we wandered down cobbled roads and found the actual Old City Coffee shop, where we planned to spend a productive day. After inhaling coffee and getting a bunch of pictures of course.

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.

After a productive morning at Menagerie Coffee with Victoria, we took a midday break and walked over to Bodhi Coffee for Productivity Part 2. Bodhi Coffee has two locations, but we went to the one at Head House Square, simply because it was closer to where we were, but Head House Square turned out to be a pretty cool place too. It’s a historic district, and right at the center of it is what used to be a fire house. I returned to Head House Square on a separate occasion with ZL, so I got to see the square in the evening too. With Rita’s custard in our hands, we walked through the fire house, accompanied by lights dancing under the archway and a horse-drawn carriage clopping along the street.

There are some productivity and self-care tips I feel like I’m always hearing over and over again, so much so that they’ve become white noise. Even the word “self-care” itself makes me think, “here we go again…” Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s really really important and I get it, but that’s just the thing; I get it, I really do. This is not new information. I want to hear something new. And yet, even though I know this, how often do I actually implement what I know? I only do what’s convenient for me or convenient for what I want. For example, I like the tip of changing my study environment as a productivity habit, and my favourite way to do this is by visiting different cafes.