Cheeky Llama Chats

Other Cafés

 

Cafés, of course are places where people gather to socialize.  It is so taken up in our town that for some, even quite elderly people, it provides the mainstay of their social life.  One couple we know can be seen every day chatting to friends, enjoying coffee and maybe a cake in a favoured café. If the conversation flows they may even stay for lunch.  It's not always social get-togethers that take place in cafés.  We've been involved with business meetings held in them and have even heard that some job interviews take place there.  Companies utilize the less threatening venue in their approach to professional development. In a so-called ‘knowledge café’ people sit around a table or tables with the aim of providing open and creative discussion on topics of mutual interest related to their work. 

 

Cafés and books have gone together for many years, centuries perhaps.  In a bookshop in Noosa last year we came upon a book club meeting among the shelves of all those new titles for sale.  As an aid to promoting book custom it must be a winner.  In Buenos Aries we found a café-bookshop where books could be perused with coffee while decisions about whether to buy were made.  Marbecks in New Zealand tried the concept, they may still be using it but they sold off the bookshop in Dunedin while keeping the café.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Aljazeera TV channel, a readily obtained app for the iPad, has a regular show called The Café where important issues of the day are discussed in a café setting, over coffee in fact.  These cafes are situated around the world depending on the issue under discussion.  In Washington, for example, the topic was:  The U.S.  Still number 1?  In Bradford:  The Dis-United Kingdom (a discussion of what it means to be British).  In Mexico City:  Failed state or economic giant?

 

Some of you may have seen the Roger Hall play Book Ends. Set on the pavement outside the Sour Dough Café, a bunch of gold-card holding guys who call themselves the Cabin Fever Club meet for coffee every Tuesday morning.  They are literary types, cantankerous and opinionated.  They mostly discuss issues that relate to books and publishing, the parlous state of that industry being a major topic of their conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘They met every Thursday at twelve-thirty, at the same restaurant and at the same table.’  So begins Derek Hansen’s Lunch With The Generals, one in a series of books where a group of friends meet each week for lunch and take it in turns to tell a story, each story being a separate novel (the others are Lunch With Mussolini, Lunch With The Stationmaster and Lunch With A Soldier).  The books are well regarded and definitely worth a read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Socrates Café are gatherings around the world where people from different backgrounds get together in public places, cafés and restaurants and exchange ideas and experiences while embracing the Socratic Method. The groups model their discussions from the book of the same name by Christopher Phillips. Today, there are over 600 ongoing gatherings around the globe coordinated by hundreds of volunteers who share the common goal of making a more inclusive world.

 

Jazz and cafés go together like peaches and cream.  That's true even in Invercargill !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       Beachhouse Deck Cafe             Windjammers at the Donovan          70th Birthday band at the Cheeky Llama        Thorn and Roses at EAT on Windsor

        sign, modelled on one

        seen in Buenos Aries