Tuesday, Breakfast Plans and a Two-Litre Lemonade

Tuesday began with a new café.

This is usually how good Tuesdays begin. Bad Tuesdays tend to begin with alarms, paperwork or someone saying, “Marco, technically the portal is stable.”

The café was called DayDay, newly opened above Halytska Square. It describes itself as an everyday city café, inspired a little by American diners, with enough breakfast choices to suggest that nobody involved believes breakfast should end at noon.

I approve of this philosophy.

I had coffee and an English breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and a hash brown. It was excellent. More importantly, it caused me to begin designing Marco’s Breakfast, which would be much simpler:

Scrambled eggs made with cream and cheese. A great deal of perfectly cooked bacon. Fresh bread, preferably still warm enough to make the butter reconsider its physical state.

Salad would be optional.

I understand that some people consider salad an important part of breakfast. I respect their beliefs, provided they keep the salad on their side of the table.

After breakfast, I ran errands through central Lviv and inspected a newly built hotel for anomalies. The owners had actually hired me to do this, which is progress. Usually, I discover the anomaly after checking in, and then management asks why the third floor now has fourteen corridors and a sunset visible from every window.

This hotel was clean. Spatially obedient. No rooms older than the building. No mirrors showing alternative guests. I found one wardrobe that felt mildly judgmental, but that is normal for expensive hotels.

They paid me anyway.

Later, I walked to the Shevchenko monument to see how many people had gathered to protest the removal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. There were several hundred—many of them young, many holding handmade signs.

I have watched governments rise, collapse and return under slightly different logos. I have also learned that people rarely stand in a city square because standing in a city square is comfortable. They do it because something matters enough to interrupt breakfast, work and the ordinary shape of their day.

That is worth noticing.

The afternoon had become hot, so I stopped at La Cafe for something cold.

The staff recognised me.

I did not recognise them.

This happens more often than it should.

They asked whether I could help with a strange event. Apparently, they had stopped serving one of their lemonades because every time they prepared it, the cup began growing. Not the drink. The cup.

Some reached nearly two litres.

Naturally, I ordered one.

Mine arrived completely normal. A disappointing and reasonably sized lemonade.

Then I tasted the sparkling water and remembered a world where water from a particular underground spring made non-living matter grow rapidly. Houses expanded overnight. Coins became dinner plates. One unfortunate village had to abandon its bell tower after the bell grew large enough to affect local weather.

I checked La Cafe’s storage room and found a thin leak between worlds behind a stack of sparkling-water bottles. Nothing dramatic—just a thread of foreign reality dripping into the carbonation supply.

I closed it, sealed the weak point and explained that their cups should now remain within accepted European beverage dimensions.

Before they changed the water, I asked them to make one final lemonade.

The cup grew to almost two litres.

I drank it by the window while watching Lviv continue around me, as though enormous lemonade were a perfectly normal ending to a Tuesday.

Perhaps it was.

Cities are made from serious things and ridiculous things happening beside each other. Protests and breakfasts. New hotels and old worries. People trying to protect what matters, while somewhere nearby a man is quietly preventing another universe from enlarging the glassware.

I think tomorrow I will begin testing Marco’s Breakfast.

For safety, I will start with twelve pieces of bacon.