I read about a Slovakian poet who lost an entire year in a Bratislava café, like an umbrella left behind in the rain. Which sounds like quite a commitment to sloth. Yet this is exactly what I love about settling into a good local café: for the price of a latte / mélange / milchcafe / koffee verkied, you buy yourself a comfortable place in the world for a few hours, and a momentary brush with the lives of others.

Space to think, gazing out the window, reflecting on life, a step away from the responsibilities and distractions of your home or work environment, these are some of the benefits of heading down to your favourite café. The café is home to your urban family, an oasis of warmth and calm to retreat to from the world of constant movement, pressure to perform, demands and stress. And someone else does the dishes! No-one expects anything of you in a café, except that you pay the bill.

When you’re traveling, and having to negotiate language, unfamiliar streets and customs, finding a local cafe that feels welcoming is an essential part of the journey. Here are 6 of my favourites.

Café Prückel, Vienna, Austria

The authentic Viennese coffee house lends itself to long langurous conversations; even today I can see the knots of young intellectuals discussing thorny philosophical complications at Café Prückel. It’s one of the original Viennese café’s on the Ring, opened in 1903, and was renovated in the 1980s with a cool ’50s decor that enhances the suave air of conceptual nonchalance displayed by the clientele. Here it is perfectly acceptable to linger for hours alone with a newspaper, and echoes remain of the rich literary tradition, with writers and poets meeting to debate ideas, gossip, stay warm and write. The last time I was in there I overheard an earnest, slender young man with trendy black-rimmed glasses and an Australian accent making slanderous comments about his theatrical partner: “He can’t sing, he can’t dance, he can’t act; he’s nothing but a dilettante!” I looked more closely and realized that the speaker was in fact an extremely well-known director (and no, I never found out who he was talking about).

Sejuiced, Bronte Beach, Sydney, Australia

Overhearing delectable tidbits and juicy gossip is one of the many perks of a life spent watching the world go by. At Sejuiced, one of the original Bronte cafes, I once overheard a spectacularly glamorous woman at the next table complain about the difficulty of finding a man who wasn’t intimidated by her success. Glancing over at her flamboyant leopard skin coat and bright red lipstick, I recognized a young, self-made cosmetics Empress, whose romantic troubles were a refreshing perspective on the drawbacks to becoming someone who had ‘made it’ in their field. All against a backdrop of palm trees with a magnificent view of the ocean rolling into Bronte beach.

Cafes Rosal & Lil, Barcelona, Spain

The Café Rosal at the end of Passeig del Born was my local for a month in Barcelona, where I never quite found a home with the local culture or people except for these momentary smiles over the counter. I loved this place, and would never have even contemplated setting foot in the more spacious, bright ‘Sandwich and Friends’ next door. Why? Partly an emotional attachment. There is a comforting patina of age on the dark wood, all of the corners are cosy, even though the chairs aren’t the most comfortable, it feels homely. Something personal in the space, that gives it soul, is a crucial ingredient. The staff can be brusque, even rude as the infamous Marios’ waiters in Melbourne, but professional, not snobbish or unfriendly, and they need to provide efficient reliability, so that you know what kind to expect.

The gorgeous Catalan owner of Cafe Lil in Barcelona, tucked away in a side street off the Princessa Montcada, always had a twinkle in his eye, making it a treat to order the decadent hot chocolate on the menu; drinking it while perusing the arty selection of books and magazines was another. The crowd was mostly Spanish and Catalan, although it was right in the middle of the tourist area, only a few blocks from the Picasso museum, there was still the feel of a hidden treasure that you had stumbled across.

Cafes Ringo & Gagarin, Berlin, Germany

Ringo, Berlin

Sometimes, it’s the music that draws me back, like my Berlin local, Ringo, which I looked into wistfully as I walked by, broke, for weeks, until I finally ventured in and they captured my heart by playing Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61’ on regular occasions. The menu is basic, coffee, cake, bagels, alcoholic drinks, and the tables aren’t quite the right height for laptop tapping, but nevertheless it is constantly filled with interesting looking people, who I am sure are all local artists and musicians, and may get to know eventually.

And this evening I have just arrived home from a regular meeting in Berlin’s Russian Gagarin Cafe with the raucous writers group I joined a few months ago. The corner table is booked for us and the waitress stops by to chat, and as we settle in to catch up on the latest gossip, critique each others work and write together, there is a new community being formed of people who find a home in this spot together for a few hours every week, that will always be there, wherever our travels take us next.

–Jodi Rose

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under List Mania: Viator's Top Picks, Travel Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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