Okay, I'll start with a coffee story. I have peculiar relations with coffee. I can't remember exactly when I started drinking it, maybe around my 20s. I always prepared it the traditional way – grinding with a coffee grinder, putting the powder in a coffee pot, adding water, and putting it on the fire. It often boiled over if I got distracted while waiting for it. I never liked instant coffee, preferring the old-school method of grinding and boiling.
It all changed after the war. In the house where I live now we have a different type of stove - an induction one. Once we came here, I bought a traditional coffee pot from Turkish market, it was very similar to the one I used back home. But sadly, it wasn't compatible with my induction stove. That's when I discovered capsule coffee. I never considered it before, but it turned out to be quite good. I purchased a cheap Nespresso coffee maker. They joke here in the Netherlands that the coffee maker is the cheapest part of the process; the capsules are the most expensive. And they're right. I like the Starbucks ones, but they're quite pricey, a few packs costing as much as a new coffee maker. So, we don't buy them often for that reason.
During our early days here, when we didn’t have jobs and could hardly make ends meet, we went to Foodbank where we took a lot of cheap capsule packs. But they tasted like shit to be honest. It all became a family joke now. That’s how it is: we have shitloads of free trash coffee capsules from the times of Foodbank and a few packs of Starbucks are always hidden on the very top shelf in the kitchen, so that we don’t take them too often. But the funny thing is, when we are about to have coffee , we take our storage box with capsules, take a look at those triste cheap ones and reach for Starbucks. And the joke is, we ask each other, "So, what are we drinking this time: Simon Bolivar or healthy people’s coffee?" We call this cheap one “Simon Bolivar” because the name of the trademark is Simon something. Well, I have quite a twisted sense of humor.