咖啡 A Peculiar Relationship

China is a tea country. An old Chinese saying identifies tea as one of seven basic necessities of life, along with firewood, oil, rice, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. Since we love tea in any form this is fantastic! 😄

However, we also love coffee (in Chinese: 咖啡)… 😀 So we set out to find some decent coffee in Beijing. Turns out that for about €4 you can either get an amazing meal with so much food you cannot eat it all or – yes, you guessed correctly – a cup of coffee!

What is also worth noting is a street called Wudaoying Hutong, a street according to Lonely Planet that is “too cool for itself”. Guess what, you find a few Berlin style speciality coffee shops here! I went into a tiny one called “Barista”, see a few pics below. It only has space for about 5-6 people but the atmosphere was amazing. Beautiful jazzy music and you get everything from cold brew to your Flat White. To quote our friend Jennifer, if you find such cool Cafés everywhere including Beijing, “then where will all the hip people go?”