Coffee and Croissants

Delightful quotes to enjoy in a cafe, from Eduardo Galleano's "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone"

A Cuppa Joe:
“The British Crown decreed that its colonies had to pay an unpayable tax. In 1773, furious colonists in North America sent forty tons of London tea to the bottom of the harbor. The operation was dubbed the Boston Tea Party. And the American Revolution began.
Coffee became a symbol of patriotism, though there was nothing patriotic about it. It had been discovered who knows when in the hinterland of Ethiopia, when goats ate the red fruit of a bush and danced all night, and after a voyage of centuries it reached the Caribbean.
In 1776, Boston’s cafes were dens of conspiracy against the British Crown. And years later, President George Washington held court in a café that sold slaves and coffee cultivated by slaves in the Caribbean.”
(Eduardo Galleano, 177)

The First Cafe:
“The croissant, another symbol of France, was born in Vienna. Not for nothing does it bear the name and form of a crescent moon, which was and remains the symbol of Turkey. Turkish troops had laid siege to Vienna. One day in 1683, the city broke the siege and that same night, in a pastry shop, Peter Wender invented the croissant. And Vienna ate the vanquished.
Then Georg Franz Kolschitzky, a Cossack who had fought for Vienna, asked to be paid in coffee beans, which the Turks had left behind in their retreat, and he opened the city’s first café. And Vienna drank the vanquished.”
(Eduardo Galleano, 194)