Pictures below.
I didn’t expect to believe any of it.
That’s the honest starting point. I sat down, drank the coffee — which is strong in a way that makes you question every cup you’ve had before it, the kind of strong you’d rather smell than commit to — flipped the cup upside down on the saucer, and waited.
The man reading it was new. New enough that he needed to pull someone else over to help him interpret what he was seeing in the grounds.
So there I was. Istanbul. A coffee cup. Two people huddled over it trying to figure out my future.
Turkish coffee fortune telling — tasseography, technically — works like this: you drink the coffee and leave the thick grounds at the bottom. Flip the cup. Let it cool. Then someone who knows what they’re looking at reads the patterns the grounds leave behind on the inside of the cup.
Shapes. Symbols. Clusters. Things that apparently mean something to the person reading them and sound either eerily specific or comfortably vague depending on how open you are to the whole thing.
I was somewhere in the middle.
What they told me centered on transformation.
A lot of it. More than felt coincidental.
The thing about a reading like that — especially one you stumble into, in a country you almost didn’t visit, from a man who needed a colleague to help him finish the job — is that it lands differently when it’s accurate. Not accurate like a prediction. Accurate like a mirror. Like something external reflecting back what you already know is happening inside you but haven’t said out loud yet.
Transformation had been the word for that entire season of my life. Still is.
I didn’t walk in looking for confirmation. I walked out with it anyway.
I’m not telling you what to believe about any of it. That’s not the point.
The point is that Istanbul hands you experiences you weren’t looking for.
You show up for the history, the architecture, the food — and somewhere between the baklava and the mosque and the walk along the water, a new employee and his colleague read your future in a coffee cup and get closer to the truth than they had any right to.
Drink the coffee. Flip the cup.
Worst case, you tried something new. Best case, the grounds know something you needed to hear.
Today’s FL10 Minute Workout: Sugar Rush
10 min · No gym · No equipment · 2 min each
- Candy Crush — Jump squats. Drop low, explode up. Land soft. That’s one.
- Caramel Drip — Slow mountain climbers. Drive each knee to your chest. Controlled. No rushing.
- Jawbreaker — Burpees. Drop to the floor, chest down, push up, jump up. Hard to finish. That’s the point.
- Gummy Bear Bounce — High knees. Run in place, knees above hip level. Stay bouncy. Stay fast.
- Melting Point — Plank hold. Arms locked, body straight. Hold until you melt into the floor.