Coffee to the People!

[5/27/2009]Yes, I'm writing this post from Coffee to the People on Masonic in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. My day has gone sideways and life has taken over for me in the most elegant way. I gave up early on and just went with the flow....

I'm surrounded by large posters of Gandhi, Emma Goldman, Nelson Mandela, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass, Cesar Chavez, Chief Joseph and Martin Luther King to read the walls a bit. Why does it not surprise me that I'm also surrounded by Macs with their little white apples glowing all around? It's everything you would expect of a Haight coffee house.

Yes, even the coffees are unique and Fair Trade. I'm drinking Flower Power, a totally vegan mix of espresso, chai and soy milk. Sipping and writing, I'm reading words of People encouragement - bumper stickers pasted to the wall with such sage advice as:

"Live Simply that all May Simply Live"
"Be the change"
"Well-behaved women rarely make history"
"Support your local revolution" and so on.

I started the day by picking up Dr. Arya who was going to demonstrate an Ayurvedic healing technique, I was going to give him some papers, and finally we were going to meet a colleague for lunch. Long story short, I've been having a completely different, yet quite an enlightening day with him, and have three more of his books (Ayurveda for the Western Mind, Ayurveda: Holistic Technology of Self Healing, and Ayurvedic Panchkarma Simplified). Which I'm now going to start reading before picking him up to meet another friend at the New Delhi Restaurant, in San Francisco also. [Later note - this restaurant was excellent, but too dim to take photos and the flowing conversation didn't make it appropriate.] And of all coincidences, the friend who joined us lives only a few houses away from the Gadar Memorial Building! A place I'd never heard of before today. You never know what bits of history may be just around the corner in San Francisco!

Back to Coffee to the People - it's a cool coffee shop with interesting music - Beatles to World, and great coffee. Oh, and free wireless Internet connection.