Morning coffee

I've recently started taking my morning coffee in a bar on the way to work. It's quite cheap to take a coffee at the comptoir, and the coffee from the machines is usually much better than I can make with my bialletti pot, even when I buy very good beans. I started by trying the cafes around our flat in the Marais, but most of them are pretty dead in the mornings, and all of them had very unfriendly staff. I then started taking coffee in St Michel just before I get on the RER. I found a pretty decent place near the Velib stop at the back entrance of the station on the blvd st germain, but the bar is right at the back and it's a bit dingy now the weather has got nicer. So now I stop at a place on the isle st louis, on the rue des deux ponts, called L'Escale. It's a very traditional family-run place, overlooking the rive gauche, with a good crowd of regulars. This morning, for the first time, the patron made me a coffee without me having to order it: this is probably because I have to park my Velib outside his window and lock it up when I arrive, a scene which is watched with a certain amount of amusement by the other customers: they say things like 'did you remember to take out the radio?'. C'est toujours drole. L'Escale translates as something like 'stopover' - it's the word used to describe a period in an airport when you have to change flights - which makes stopping there in the morning seem logical.