The mystery of the coffee cups
A Finland adventure
Hello friends,
Hope you are having a pleasant Friday.
I am emailing to see if you are in the mood to read thousands of words about happiness and Finland. If so, here’s a link to slingshot you over the paywall at the New York Times Magazine, where you’ll find a piece on that topic.
Despite the headline it was a fun and intriguing story to write.1 Soon (this weekend or next) it will be available in print. And on The Daily podcast in audio form. What I’m getting at is, this story is surrounding you from all sides and you can’t escape…might as well read it before a pair of goons shows up at your door to hit you over the head with rolled-up hard copies.
Or—below is a little scene that didn’t belong in the story, but was illuminating. You could read that instead.
Cheers,
Molly
One of the underrated pleasures of travel is encountering ordinary things in different shapes. Traffic lights, doors, trash cans, street signs, fences, soap dispensers: objects that exist beneath notice at home take new forms in a foreign country and, in so doing, bounce jubilantly back into one's field of vision. You can entertain yourself for hours just by walking around with a Sherlock Holmes attitude, treating regular objects as mysteries.
A surprising amount of restaurant seating in Helsinki, for example, consisted of benches, stools, and other backless options. Why? Was it because benches and stools required less raw material than chairs, and were therefore more eco-friendly? (Finland is extremely eco-friendly.) Or was it because Finns have excellent posture and don't require the reminder of a resistant surface to maintain their ramrodness?
Not only were the shapes of things different, but so too were the sizes. If you go from the U.S. to almost any other country, you'll notice a decrease in the size of manmade products—cars, sofas, handbags, elevators, sandwiches.
This was borne out in Helsinki. Not a lot of SUVs. Not a lot of jumbo infant strollers. The most conspicuously miniaturized item was the coffee cup. Finns drink coffee nonstop. They consume more coffee, per capita, than any other nation. They drink it from small cups, refilled constantly. Nobody has coffee breath.
At a bar one afternoon I witnessed an interaction involving the size of coffee cups. An English tourist came in and asked for a cup of coffee. The bartender directed the man to a coffee station at the end of the bar. "The cups are small, but you can refill it as many times as you like," he explained. And the cups were small, just slightly bigger than a demitasse. The English tourist looked at the cups and then back at the bartender. Behind the bartender stood a row of larger cups, perhaps twelve ounces each. The tourist pointed to the larger cups.
"Could I have one of those instead?" he asked.
"Ah, but these cups are for lattes," the bartender said.
"Yes, but could I have one for coffee?"
"But the coffee cups are over there, by the coffee machine."
This went on repetitively for a minute until the tourist surrendered in irritation. He went muttering to the machine, filled a tiny cup with coffee, drank it in a single gulp, refilled it, drank the second in a single gulp, refilled it, and took the bar seat closest to the machine in order to achieve further refills with a minimal commute. The act of shooting two cups of coffee tequila-style seemed to discharge the tourist's belligerence; for an hour he sat contentedly texting on an iPhone.
My table happened to form an equidistant third point between the tourist's seat and the bartender, which gave the conversation the feel of a one-act play. From the Finn's perspective, a Chesterton's Fence logic seemed to obtain. Yes, it would have been easy to give the English tourist a larger cup, but the coffee-cups-are-small norm existed for a good reason—just as most Finnish norms existed for good reasons—and ought to be upheld, even if the benefit in this particular case wasn't self-evident. To the English tourist, the bartender's fidelity to an apparently pointless formality was a denial of the men's shared humanity, and even an insult.
Which of the two men was at fault? The Englishman, obviously—in part for failing to adapt to his environment and in part for making a fuss, which is impolite in all cultures. The customer is not always right, I wrote in my notebook.
But the lesson did not stick. The next day I elevatored downstairs to the breakfast buffet at my hotel. Here, too, the coffee cups were tiny. On previous mornings I'd gotten up six or seven times to refill my tiny cup. It hadn't really bothered me, but I was still delighted, on this new morning, to think of a "hack": located one flight of stairs beneath the buffet, in the hotel lobby, was a separate coffee station with a stack of recyclable To-Go cups. The To-Go cups held about 16 ounces.
After getting my food at the buffet (whipped lingonberry porridge, malt bread, rectangle of omelet) I walked downstairs, retrieved a big cup, walked upstairs, filled it with coffee and sat down to eat. Within minutes one of the hotel's breakfast overseers appeared at my table.
"Hei!" she said, smiling hugely.
"Hei."
"I noticed that you're using a cup from the lobby for the coffee?"
"Yes," I said, with the dawning disgrace of the freshly-caught cheater.
"But we have coffee cups here for you to use."
"Yes, I know. I will take this cup with me when I leave."
"Ok! Because we already have many cups here."
"I understand," I said. "I'm sorry."
There was no alternative response; no way for an adult to remain dignified while uttering a sentence like "But I just want a bigger cup." The employee left to tidy up the bread station, removing crumbs of malt bread and restoring an errant butter knife to its assigned place. How entitled and unreasonable I must have seemed—just like the previous day’s Englishman, from whom I'd apparently learned nothing!
Gratitude to Emily Huizenga, Hertta Kiiski, Mikko Tirronen, Avocado Ibuprofen, Saskia Vogel, Hunter Dukes and many, many others who helped guide the voyage.