I moved to Spain, or Catalunya, originally for a month, armed with no Catalan and very little Spanish besides the extremely useful “un café con leche, por favor.” I stayed almost a year, and returned for another summer later, and in the course of that learned considerably more Spanish, and some Catalan. Nonetheless, if I were to conduct a survey of what I said most during my time in Barcelona, I would say that “un café con leche, por favor” would continue to rank very near the top.

Although I had begun to drink cafe con leches in Cuba three years previously, I had always considered them the stuff of holidays, and drunk tea at home. In Barcelona they became the drink of choice, partly because the water was so vile that tea was practically undrinkable, but partly also, because the culture surrounding them is so delightful.

Un cafe con leche, por favor. Or, in Catalan: un cafe amb llet, si us plau.

In North America, I liked to tell the locals, we buy an enormous coffee, and we run around drinking it all day. When it runs out, we buy another enormous coffee, and run around with that one. In Barcelona, the idea of running around with a cafe con leche is ridiculous. A cafe con leche requires you to sit down, insists that you take a little break from all your running around. A cafe con leche should, weather permitting, which it usually does, be consumed at a little table outside, under an umbrella. A cafe con leche allows you to read a book for pleasure, talk nonsense with a friend, or regard the world musingly from behind dark glasses. A cafe con leche suggests that maybe an accompanying croissant would be a good idea, yes the chocolate one. Oh no? Oh well then, the cream one. And maybe after the cafe con leche and the croissant are happily finished, if you still have a few free minutes, the aftertaste of the cafe con leche will whisper that you and your friend should share another pastry, and that you should each have another cafe con leche.

A cafe con leche in Barcelona, in short, means sunshine, means not caring that you’ve just sloshed some of it over the side of your cup, like you always do. Means socialising, or just enjoying by yourself the satisfying tearing sound that comes with ripping the top of a packet of sugar. Means only paying 1.20 euro for the whole experience, which means of course, that you can experience the cafe con leche as often as you want.