In Beijing—despite its metropolitan enormity—it is surprisingly challenging to find a cappuccino. With the help of our Chinese friend, maps in two languages, and hours of searching, we netted zero cappuccinos. We eventually stumbled, weary and parched, into a Starbucks inside a shopping mall. Starbucks, for all of its grace, only serves in paper cups. So I ended up with an enormous thirty-ounce paper cut with a triple shot of espresso. It was smooth and wonderful, though I never went to sleep again.
We then traveled on to Luoyang. This is a small town, by Chinese standards, a mere six or seven million people. Amidst the towering, identical apartment buildings and pleasant parks, there were, unfortunately, no cafes that could produce a cappuccino. For all its charm, Luoyang failed from a cappuccino perspective.
I wandered the streets day in and day out looking for cappuccino and failed repeatedly.
With our sights set on the Shaolin Temple, we found a pleasant apartment in the town of Deng Feng, which is considerably smaller and less developed than the other places that we have traveled. I wandered the streets day in and day out looking for cappuccino and failed repeatedly. Then, chatting with two other foreigners, they indicated that there was, in fact, one–count it, one–coffee house in Deng Feng. After walking a couple of miles in the rain with my youngest son in tow, we found it. It was everything a European might dream of. It had bookshelves with eccentric books, sketches and blueprints on the wall, and cappuccino for me (and hot cocoa for my son): victory, Deng Feng.
The Terra-cotta Warriors are not, as we once thought, in Xi’an, China’s ancient capital city. They are in an area popular with emperors past for its hot springs, about an hour east of the big city. Though somewhere between seven and thirteen dynasties housed their capital in the Xi’an area, only some were specifically in the famous walled area of Xi’an. And though Emperor Qin’s mausoleum draws innumerable tourists to this sleepy residential district, we again failed to procure a cappuccino.
In fact, it never seemed to be open.
Upon arriving in Xi’an proper, however, we were delighted to see that there was a place called “Coffee Dream” right outside of our apartment. I made plans to go there first thing in the morning, and I was dismayed to find it was not open—in fact, it never seemed to be open. So, along with my middle son, I walked and walked and walked. We eventually found a Starbucks Reserve. This is like a Starbucks, except you get to drink out of a ceramic cup. It was truly blissful. We love Xi’an.
We continued along the train line to Turpan, which is in Xinjiang, our second stop along the Silk Road, and the first place that began to feel significantly less Chinese. I optimistically assumed that this would mean more coffee. But it didn’t; we tried three different places, and finally found a tea house that assured me they could make a cappuccino. They did, in a sense, but it was kind of terrible. They should probably stick with making tea.
The Han Chinese are tourists just like us.
We are now in Kashgar, our final stop in China, and the least Chinese place that we’ve ever been to. The Uighurs are an ethnic majority here; the Han Chinese, on the other hand, are typically behind high powered cameras–tourists just like us. And so, it is with only a little bit of surprise and true delight that we found multiple places that serve authentic cappuccinos. Good, wonderful cappuccinos.
Tomorrow we leave China to cross the mountain range that separates China from Central Asia and enter “the Stans,” presumably finding areas that favor coffee over tea. But really, who knows?