OK… I can see how this could be getting a little confusing… see… I live in two cities.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. If I’ve lived anywhere (and I mean lived in the lightest of ways. I count places I’ve lived in for three months), then I count it as home. I was born and raised in New York City, but spent weekends, summers, and holidays in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. In the seventh grade, my family moved to San Francisco, California, and then the year after, we moved back to New York. One year after moving back, I spent three months in Mouvaux, a neighbor town of Lille, in the north of France. The year after that, I started going to boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. I graduated three years later, and now find myself in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. *Whew* that’s a mouthful.
So as you can see, I have a connection to many places all over the globe, however, I feel the strongest connections to my hometown, New York, and my newest home, Toronto, which is why I’ve decided to devote a daily blog to each one.
Which brings me to today, and Porto Rico. My sister and I discovered Porto Rico after passing it one day on Bleecker street and recognizing the name from a book we had both just read called Smart vs. Pretty (I’m smart, she’s pretty).
Porto Rico is heaven on Earth for any coffee-lover. It’s a wholesale coffee store displaying its wares in the big, burlap sacks they come in. They provide coffee in bulk to the coffee stores nearby, but they also sell brewed coffee and pound and half pound bags to the public.
Whenever I’m in the area, I hit Porto Rico. We generally buy our coffee from Peet’s, but at half the price and twice the quality, I often find myself coming back up on the subway, my bag and clothes, reeking of coffee, concealing what has been termed by the MTA “a suspicious package”.
The store has three locations, and perhaps its the one I frequent that forbids photos, but every time I’ve been, one of the employees has lunged at me the second my digital camera threatens to even come out of my bag. However, I did puruse flickr and find a few pictures, the credit for which I must attribue to roboppy and aaroncorey.
