From day to night I live off coffee. For most, coffee has a huge affect as to keeping them awake at night or super hyper, depending on the sugar added in, but for me, coffee is like drinking water. I go crazy over coffee. I find it as flavored water with milk and sugar. I have traveled countries, cities, and been to as many new and different coffee shops there are just to try their coffee. For me, wether its a cappuccino, an espresso or regular coffee pot roast its amazing. I’m always on the hunt to see what hidden gem that serves coffee can make me fall in love with it.
It was just this past Christmas, the season of giving, where I discovered the best coffee I have tasted. As a tradition, my neighbors and my family always exchange house gifts. This year, our neighbors brought us this huge basket all filled with edible goodies; a basket filled with chocolate to panettone to cookies. Though after taking everything out of the nicely arranged basket, there was this small one-pound bag filled with grinds of coffee. You could tell it was freshly griinded because there was no seal, and rather a wire around the top. The second that bag of coffee was opened, it was as if you could get hypnotized from the coffee smell. It was that good!
Months later, the one pounder coffee was finished. My mum had written down the name of the coffee store, though with such close proximity to us, we have never heard of “Empire Coffee”. My mum had never forgotten the taste of the coffee, and she would always refer back to it. With two locations, one in Midtown Manhattan and the other in Hoboken, it was more understood to come across it in Hoboken rather than Manhattan.
Three Sunday’s ago, I got up and visited a museum that I’ve been dying to visit in Astoria, Queens. On my way to transfer to take the subway I wanted to surprise my mum with a bag of Empire Coffee. I stopped at the store by 9th Ave and 41St in Midtown, to only open a door to a store that magnetically pulled me in. The second I had opened that door, the scent of coffee almost substituted my cologne I was wearing.
Ever since that Christmas that coffee bag was delivered to us, and ever since that Sunday I went to buy more coffee, mornings at the Kourmousis household smell differently now. The kitchen begins to spread the scent of coffee to the whole house!
And that is the reason as to why I love being a local guide for Google. It is stories like the one I shared that give passion and adventure and mystery in everyday life. Its for the reason to find what is hidden and you do not know about while others do. It’s for the sake of getting up and trying something different that others might gave you a thumbs up about. I love sharing my experiences with others and making them understand what not only I come across on a daily basis. Being a local guide helps me find those hidden coffee shops all around Manhattan. It may actually be hidden in an alleyway or on the basement of a building or rhetorically hidden in the aspect that one may have never have noticed it. Being a guides gives me the ability to explore places that I still have yet to see and that’s why I love it!
