Remembering CyberNation: Food
To this day, Amazon Mist carries with it strong memories of the early Cnation days. One sip is all it takes to be back in 1996. Unfortunately, the drink seems to have disappeared. Everywhere I look that used to carry it now claims ignorance of its availability.
I remember the Thai Soup place at the back of the food gutter whose soup was wonderful. On a rainy day their soup with the little cup of hot sauce was perfect. The soup came in a big styrafoam cup with the plastic lid taped down on opposite sides so that undoing one side would allow the other to be used as a hinge. The soup came with cheap round chopsticks in a clear plastic wrapper.
The hot chocolate at Richard’s coffee shop downstairs was a daily thing during the heavy rains of 1997. After walking from school to work in the pouring rain, often in shorts and a t-shirt or my flannel, the first stop was the coffee shop for hot chocolate. (On non-rainy days, this was the time for Amazon Mist.) The girl that worked there (I believe her name was Jennifer?) had the hot chocolate thing down. Richard on the other hand would invariably burn it. When Leo was working at Cnation, we’d show up at the coffee shop together. Due to some sort of miscommunication, Jennifer always thought Leo’s name was Neil, and he never corrected her; At first, I don’t think he realized that she was making a mistake, whereas later it was just too awkward to clear up the mistake after having responded to ‘Neil’ for so long. For the duration of Leo’s stay at Cnation, he was always known as Neil on the first floor.