Mikael
5th ape and a little tryhard wannabe vagabond. Usually thinking positive.
Simona
Orange haired idealist looking for her mission on earth. Smiles often. :)
Beginning of New Year is usually a time to make a list of New Year’s resolutions. So we also want to share ours with you! Actually it’s not a list. And maybe not a resolution. Just one big dream that we hope to implement this year. And we’ve been living with it for already quite a while, it got matured, and is ready to be shared. Actually it’s already more than a dream, it’s a plan! And that dream-plan is called – our own café in Vilnius!
Not a simple café. A travel themed café. For travellers. For those dreaming about travelling. And for those travelling in their rich inner lands. A cosy place with soft sofas, where you could feel like at home sipping some herbal teas. Or wander far away reading travel magazines and tasting coffee from the lands of Sumatra. Maybe even swing in a hammock on a cold winter day and eat a coconut dessert dreaming about sun and palm trees. Check changing travel photo gallery on the walls to get inspired and watch travel related movies or listen for storytelling in the evenings. Or just come for delicious specially prepared coffee, tea, bakeries or lunch from different corners of the world. Everything simple, but special.
We know it will be difficult. Yes, we’re not experts, but everything is learnable. And we like to learn. And we have learnt much already. When having a chance we have been reading a lot about everything from coffee, tea, cafes success (and failure) stories to Lithuanian legislations, hygienic requirements and café forums messages. And spending hours collecting ideas of what to paint on the walls or how to creatively refurbish old chairs. And even accounting or legislative info can become an interesting evening read when it concerns your dream. Of course reality will be different and more complicated. But if we leave all these ideas just in computers’ memory we’ll never know how it would really be!
For now we still follow bumpy roads of South East Asia. But our café is already living in our minds. We note all the little details in all the cosy places that we come upon on our road. We visit the lands of coffee, tea and cacao. We see how its’ grown and processed. We get some ideas of exotic, but simple desserts that might be part of our menu. We chat with people who have similar ideas or work in cafes. We’re still in Indonesia, but in some part of our minds we are already back.
And now a message to all of you our friends, for those we met and those we haven’t yet, travellers and non travellers, coffee drinkers and those with sweet teeth! We’ll need your help, especially when our dream starts getting real shape. But already now if you have any great ideas, knowledge or enthusiasm and would like to share them with us, we would be very very happy! Or more practically, if you accidentally come upon a place for rent in Vilnius oldtown that might be perfect for this café or know where to get cheap second hand furniture or other interesting stuff especially related to travels, let us know! Big big thanks!
A bit late, but still happy New Year for all! Follow your dreams!
Sounds great!
I just read about a man with a coffee hobby, or would I say: coffee enthusisat. He said that he orders his coffee from the internet, coffee of small identifiable farms. I just wondered, that if it doesn’t become too expensive, maybe your café could have that kind of specialties on the list – together with cheaper, more normal coffee, of course. And of course – the freshier the beans, the better.
My friend wa working in a tea shop in Montréal. I can ask if she has some tips.
And, see you soon! Great to have you back on this continent! Enjoy your last seikkailut!
We’ll work closely together with smaller roasteries, that really care and tell where their beans come from. Everything in coffee making matters, especially the bean. I’ll tell you a lot about coffee now that I’ve learned so much!
About tea we still need to figure out if it’s better to be in contact with sellers in Asia / India or wholesale companies in Lithuania. Anyway, our tea selection will be grand, including local Lithuanian specialities.
Nähään pian! Enää reilu kuukaus reissua jäljellä, huh huh!
I’ll be your first guest.
Simona, Mikael … thats a fantastic idea. I have some reciepts i collected during my travels.
you can make theme weeks. this week is balkan week, next week is china week, the next week is a peru week and then is a thailand week, then alaska, … :)
i’ll come to vilnius in late spring (end of may/beginning june) – after the abgefahren hitchhiking race 2012… and when you come back, with the plane? if you arrive in frankfurt, brussels or paris, just let me know it will be a pleasure for me to invite you in trier.
best wishes to the far away south-east-asia
tommy
and by the way i am curious to taste one of the lithunian sweets your taking about in the block so often
Thanks Jonna, yep we’ve been thinking about that as well! That we should have coffees from different countries and educate people that coffee differs from where it is it from and what type it is. Only finding through internet, you cannot really check how they really are. Would be nice to be able to travel to all these places, hunting for coffee :)
Tommy,good idea with theme weeks,or maybe months we could do at the beginning, helps not to be stuck with the same menu. We’ll see what we’ll come up to at the end. Btw, maybe you could share some recipes you collected? :) We are flying to Paris, I see it’s not so far from Trier, we haven’t plan our trip back in Europe yet, so we’ll see,maybe :)…And the Lithuanian sweets you probably mean Surelis, you must come to Lithuania for that!