What's with the creamers ...?

I just have to get this one out of my system: You know how it is when you move to a different country and all your assumptions are suddenly thrown upside-down? What you thought was obvious, what you took for granted, now just isn't? It's completely the other way around ...?

Ever since I came here, I've had this very frustrated relationship with coffee. Actually, coffee per se is material for a whole 'nother blog. What I'm concerned about here and now is the stuff that goes into it! (Okay, you'll tell me that Americans have come a long way as far as coffee goes, and that they now have this wonderful *Star-bucks$ coffee culture, but if you just give me a chance, I'll be able to explain to you how they've in fact gone completely haywire with coffee ...)

Now, what's wrong with plain old-fashioned coffee with milk? Just pour a cup of coffee, then add a dash of milk into it (to dilute all that bad coffe taste ...) Sounds so simple and obvious. Then, why is it that each time I buy one of those bad, lukewarm, sour, reheated coffee-in-a-papercup's from the distracted, obnoxious, self-centered, incompetent girls at that over-priced, coffee stand outside my office building, that I have to explicitly ask them if it's possible to get some milk with it? They'll offer cream (which I despise in my coffee), or even better: some icky hazelnut-cream, or some "powder somethin's", and cinnamon, brown sugar and cocoa powder. But milk, that's out of the ordinary "special needs". While, when they take my order they will ask me: "Would you like some whipped cream with that?" Come on, whipped cream? With my coffee? I mean, are those guys insane?

Thus, I've come to realise that milk is NOT what you put in your coffee here. So be it! But the weird part is, they put all this other stuff in it: There exist about as many different types of "creamers" here, as there are different types of cheeses in France. A creamer is basically a non-dairy product that looks like milk when you pour it into your coffee, but (don't be fooled) isn't. So, it doesn't contain milk, although I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly what it is that it does contain. Well, okay, the contents might say something like: sugar, hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil, sodium caseinate, artificial flavors, dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, artificial colors. Actually, even worse, the description might contain artificial sweetener too, like that repulsing aspartame.

Examples of flavors would be: French Vanilla (the one I'm holding right now), Cinnamon Vanilla Cream, Cafe' Mocha, Amaretto, Hazelnut, Irish Cream, Fireside Coffee Creamer (with cinnamon, nutmeg and cocoa), Toffee, Orange (with dried orange peel, but why, why, why would you want orange in your morning coffee ...), Cappuccino, ...

Maybe this is all good, but how about just some normal coffee out of natural coffee beans with natural coffee flavor with natural cow milk and eventually natural sugar every once in a while ...