Every morning at Stumble Inn, I have a pancake with fruits and a glass of freshly squeezed juice for breakfast. Some mornings, the fruits are pineapple and banana, sometimes there is papaya, or mango. One time, there was even watermelon. And the juice is either orange or pineapple. For some reason, they don’t put any salt in the pancake batter, but with a sprinkle of salt on the fruits, this breakfast is perfect.
It brings me back to another set of breakfasts. I know you must be sick of my travel flashbacks by now. But that’s kind of how my brain works, connecting things. Time is not linear. Maybe I like these early morning breakfasts (mom and I are mostly at the bar by seven, when the kitchen opens) because of the good memories that they invoke, or maybe the memories turn good because the present is so nice. I don’t know. I just know I very much enjoy sitting there on my high chair at the bar at Stumble Inn, eating my fruit pancake and remembering all the pancakes I ate for breakfast at Parque Machía in Villa Tunari in Bolivia.
I was volunteering there, taking care of maltreated monkeys in the quarantine, feeding them, cleaning the cages, playing with them, and singing to them when none of the other volunteers were around. I even got the very shy spider monkey Marucha, who always kept her distance, to come and sit in my lap by just sitting on a log and singing Swedish folk songs to myself. Some creatures just need time to get used to you. Most will come around, eventually, if you act harmless enough.
And every morning, I had a pancake with papaya for breakfast. It was a tough job, I’ve rarely been as tired in my entire life, both physically and mentally, but all in all, I remember it as a mainly positive experience. Especially those pancakes.
At Stumble Inn, there are no monkeys. But the cats climb on tables and walls not quite unlike the cappucines that I worked with. And both were and are always looking for food.
Katja Malmborg 