It’s been a whirlwind few days leading up to my appointment as official press secretary and handwriting scribe for the US Barista team. I flew into Atlanta on Saturday to allow plenty of time for civilian adventures, which included but were not limited to old friends, a perplexing burger experience, a tour of the Atlanta botanical gardens, and some rambling, tree-lined, flower-filled sunset driving. (I also escaped both to and from Alabama for about 24 hours, just long enough to take in a flea market, a killer thunderstorm, some boiled peanuts by the side of the highway, and a one-eyed cat.)

But anyway, Atlanta is a wasteland of conventions and unbelievably large hotels, three or four of which I have gotten lost in already. I recommend the Westin for its cavernous post-apocalypticity, sort of like if the QE II ran aground in the middle of Olympic Park and got redecorated by Christo. (And you should check out the stairwells, too.) It’s here that my new Aussie friends Jenny and Ben were nice enough to let me grab a swim, at the end of which I was approached poolside by a half-dozen teen girls in logoe’d burkas asking if it would bother me if they photographed the pool. They are the Saudi Arabian Women’s Lego robot racing team, so I will obviously be attending that convention instead of the SCAA/World Barista Championships. Sorry, coffee.

The competition doesn’t start for a couple of hours, and I haven’t yet met a lot of the international competitors yet, though I did have the brief opportunity to try to explain buttermilk fried chicken to the Colombian contingency. Not sure if they understood? Send ’em over to Carver’s if they’re still not sure. The US kids rolled in yesterday with their message of hope and inspiration for some other nation all wrapped up in a Ray Charles-Bruce Springsteen double LP (because music, like coffee, is an international language) and today every single person I know in NYC and Chicago will also show up. Luckily I am well rested from a night of hamburger altercations and Freudian dreams… meet you all in line at the WBC coffeebar?