Shortly after I arrived in Milan, I ordered a green tea. By the time I was to finally leave the cafe, I realized that the little decorative display that came with my tea was functional — my mind sort of blocked it out as being a lemon slice and instead interpreted it as some kind of flower. Looking at it now, the shrouded toothpick seems to signal a kind of warning to me to “stay away”; and furthermore green tea is not normally served with lemon. There was a mixup of competing context-s for my attention, and my jetlag wasn’t helping any bit.

That’s okay as in the end, I didn’t have to mutilate the lemon slice and managed to preserve the arrangement in its original state to live forever in a photograph.