The First Coffee Shop in Poet City

As the weather gets wintery in our corner of Central Asia, I’m reminded of my first winter here back in late 2007. Like many, I had wrongly assumed that because this area was some kind of desert, it wouldn’t really be that cold in the winter. After all, I was coming from having just spent a year in Minneapolis. So, I laughed off the suggestions that I bring serious winter gear like long johns. This was a mistake.

Our first few weeks on the ground did seem surprisingly mild for November. But then the rains started. And with the rains, the city suddenly got very cold. Overnight, the ACs and swamp coolers were switched off and the kerosene and LPG heaters turned on. To this day, the abrupt shift to winter weather still surprises us. Here in Caravan City, it just happened this past week.

This will be our first winter living in a 24-hour electricity apartment. But for that winter of ’07-’08 in Poet City, we were living in a typical cement, plaster, and tile local home. These traditional homes have a peculiar ability to absorb and radiate the cold such that the inside of the house often feels colder than the outside. Add to this the drastic power cuts that are normal during the winter and the fact that you can’t safely keep kerosene and LPG heaters on overnight, and the winters of this high desert region end up feeling much colder than those in the US, even though it doesn’t technically get as cold or have as much snowfall as our home city in Kentucky.

No, the issue is that in Central Asia, your house is freezing. All the time. I learned quickly that the ability to reliably get truly warm at home during the winter has quite the effect on how severe you feel the season to be. Add to all this the fact that the winter of ’07-’08 was the coldest one on record here in forty years and that our hodge-podge group of Western dude roommates didn’t really know how to handle a Central Asian house in winter, and you can see why we were very much in need of finding some kind of refuge of warmth and comfort.

For me, one of these oases was the Central Asian bathhouse. My jaded musician friend, Hama*, had introduced me to this glorious descendant of Roman bathhouses, tucked away in the alleyways of the bazaar. The traditional pillar of community hygiene offered as much steam, hot water, and sweet chai as one could handle. But because the bathhouse was frequented mostly by elderly local men who tended to bathe naked, no one seemed to want to come with me. Not even when I told them about the giant hairy man in a Speedo who would scrub your back and give you a painful massage for a mere $3.

Thankfully, there was one oasis of warmth that we could all go to together. And that was The First Coffee Shop in Poet City. That winter, this establishment became like our second home.

The history of coffee shops here is an interesting one. Coffee was more popular than tea in this region during the Middle Ages and for most of the Western Age of Exploration. But according to one source I found, it was actually the American War of Independence that shifted our region’s preferred source of caffeine. The Americans famously boycotted British tea, turning instead to Brazilian coffee for their patriotic caffeination. And so America has been a majority coffee-drinking nation ever since. But the loss of the American market meant that the Brits were in need of new customers for all of their product. They turned to Central Asia, specifically, Persia. This caused all kinds of religious dilemmas for the Persian Islamic clerics, who scrambled to proclaim fatwas declaring how drinking the infidel-supplied tea in this way was sinful and haram, but drinking it in this way was fine and halal.

Eventually, the forces of the marketplace (and the fact that black spiced chai with lots of sugar is delicious) overwhelmed whatever strong opposition there may have been in the beginning. And so the residents of Central Asia have now become majority tea drinkers, swapping places with those rebellious American colonists. However, as recently as 100 years ago, travelers to our area still spoke of coffeehouses instead of teahouses. The beverage had changed, but the older name still stuck. But by the time I came around in 2007, even the name of these traditional establishments had shifted to be teahouses, chaihouses to give a direct translation.

Yet until 2007, there were no coffee shops, at least not in the modern Western sense of the term. However, some enterprising local who had spent time as a refugee in Europe came back to his home city and decided he would change that. This was just in time for our team, who would retreat to this coffee shop on the long dark days with no electricity so that we could get some hot coffee, use some internet, and even use a Western toilet instead of a squatty potty. One should not underestimate how refreshing this particular combination can be.

On dark evenings we would meet up there as well, enjoying fingir, the local form of french fries, plus local pizza – which comes without tomato sauce and instead with a criss-crossed drizzle of mayonnaise and ketchup on top. Adam* would often join us, entertaining us with hilarious stories from his childhood and encouraging us by recounting opportunities he’d recently had to share the gospel.

We Westerners are funny when it comes to our coffee shops. Like a moth to a flame, if you build it, we will come. We really do love ourselves some coffee, internet, and a cozy-productive atmosphere. In fact, if anyone ever wanted to collect serious intel on those Westerners (or missionaries) that live in a given city, setting up a coffee shop could be quite the effective method. Especially if said coffee shop also had its own generator so that it has power when the other neighborhoods have gone dark on winter evenings. Needless to say, we were very loyal customers and became very fond of that place. I wrote not a few emails there to a girl I (mistakenly) thought I was supposed to marry. And it was there that I tried to wax eloquent during my first attempt at blogging.

Today, the cities of our region are positively overflowing with Western-style coffee shops. The owner of the beloved First Coffee Shop in Poet City was truly ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, his groundbreaking business ended up eventually overshadowed by the newer, hipper, and shinier Coffee Shops of those who followed in his footsteps. The First Coffee Shop was still around during my vision trips with my wife during the 2010s, but it was noticeably emptier. Then, at some point during our first term, it closed for good.

These days I’ve been frequenting a legit third-wave Coffee Shop here in Caravan City, the first place where you can get not only decent espresso drinks but also offerings like good filter coffee, pour-overs, and bottled cold brew. As far as I know, it’s the first one to be opened in our region that truly operates at international standards of quality (or coffee snobbery, depending on your perspective). They’ll soon be opening a branch back in Poet City as well, meaning it took eighteen years to get from the first Coffee Shop of any kind there to the kind of place where you can saunter in and order a Chemex.

But I was there, long ago in the cold and dark winter of 2007, to witness the first one. Seeing these shiny new establishments the newbies take for granted I feel a bit like Elrond – “I was there, Gandalf… I was there… 3,000 years ago,” sipping a bitter and musty Americano as the black wind from the mountains moaned outside, thankful that any kind of Coffee Shop existed at all, that I could get warm, get online – and that they had a Western toilet.

The First Coffee Shop in Poet City is now long gone. But today, on American Thanksgiving, I raise a toast, a metaphorical cup of very bad coffee, to that pioneering establishment. You were an oasis of warmth during a brutal winter that was, in the words of an Irish teammate, “positively Baltic.” By sitting at your tables we were refreshed and strengthened in a season when we were new missionaries who were very much in over our heads – and freezing to boot. And for that, I will always be very grateful.

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*Names of places and individuals have been changed for security