“No Caffeine for You.”

July 15, 2008

Not sure exactly what happened this morning, but the ladies in the inn’s restaurant did not want to serve me breakfast. I asked for a cheese omelette anyway, and they brought me one, but no coffee. ”Thé? I asked. “C’est fini,” she answered, and then took coffee to another patron.

Hm.

I have a caffeine-withdrawal headache that you wouldn’t believe. Wah. I could go out and get a coke somewhere, but it’s a big thing; you can’t drink on the streets—it’s considered unhygienic and rude. Beside that, I want to sleep tonight.

I can tell you now that if I don’t get caffeine tomorrow morning, I might be a ferociously ugly American. The thing is, though, that you should never, ever, piss off anyone who has anything to do with your food. Remember “The Color Purple”? Well, that’s only the half of it. So if I don’t get coffee here, I’ll go up to Bourbon and pay American prices.

So I think I didn’t get served this morning because the ladies there might think I had something to do with the hotel personnel getting held overnight at police headquarters for questioning. Yes, there’s a story.

Most of this I heard through my open window. The Dutch interns next door sit on my porch, and it tends to be a congregation area for people in their 20s, so I end up hearing way more of their stories than I’d like.

But anyway, on Sunday, a woman from Kenya who was staying in No. 1 across the courtyard from us went to the restaurant to order some food. She locked her door, but she said that when she came back, she discovered her camera and money were stolen. One of the desk clerks, the one who has been nothing but helpful and kind, asked the intern sitting outside if she saw anyone enter No. 1. They went round and round for awhile, and that’s when we heard the story from the Kenyan woman. I came out to see if there was trouble, and since I couldn’t help, I went back inside to continue working.

There was more conversation for awhile, off and on, including the desk clerk asking to borrow an intern’s phone to call the supposed thief, a guy who works at the inn. The intern asked him to explain why he wanted to call, and he explained that if the guy had stolen, he would have turned off his phone (or something to that effect). The desk clerk wanted to call the guy from a number that the guy wouldn’t recognize. The intern told the desk clerk that was stupid and didn’t lend him her phone.

So when I got back to the inn very late yesterday, like 9:40, I was supposed to get a book back from the nice desk clerk. But instead of him behind the counter, it was some new guy, and he said my friend wouldn’t be there that night. When I got to my porch, one of the Dutch interns was sitting there, working on her laptop. I asked her if anything interesting happened and that’s when she told me that the police had come and taken both desk clerks, the gardener, and two cleaning boys and were going to hold them overnight so they could make a statement.

Tonight they are still not back. So things could be much worse than a caffeine-withdrawal headache.