A MILD RANT CONCERNING TEA

One of those places to which you go not because the food is superlative and exquisite -- it's good, but strictly common, home-like and hometown, what in Chinese is called 家鄉食 ('gaa heung sik'), so don't expect tender delicacies -- but because you like the place as well as the people who run it. Half a dozen old geezers having lunch in silence, two or three customers who got lunch to go while I was there. Pork stuffed cucumber (豬肉釀青瓜 'chü yiuk yeung cheng gwaa'), plus tofu with pale meat scraps, stewed eggplant, and rice.

Around the corner from an errand I had already run.
Lit up a pipe immediately afterward.
Sadly, no milk tea.


That is to say, no Hong Kong Style Milk Tea, which will send the working man back up twenty stories of rickety bamboo scaffolding in a typhoon for another four hours, or the office drooge back to his desk till midnight frantically stacking papers. Instead, one can, if one feels like a dingy Taiwanese highschool girl with too much eyeliner, swill boba tea with a mango passion fruit flavour and get both plumper than one was, as well as more malnourished, because there is bugger all nutrion in that, and it takes up space. Gives you that bloated look.
No actual fruits involved. Sugar, colouring matter, sago, artificial dairy. Yum.

You probably don't smoke decent tobacco either, do you?

But hey, you do you.

There are over half a dozen "tea shops" within a mere two blocks of where I ate lunch. Not a single one of them is committed to jet-fuelling a hard working individual OR a middle aged Dutch American with a pipe. A remarkably fine pipe. Peterson, shape 87S. Filled with red Virginia, with mere touches of fire-cured, Turkish, and Perique. Delightful evidence of civilization not being quite dead yet.

Despite the prevalence of that boba tea.
Which is horrible, tell you what.
Sign of the end-times.


What this world needs, truly desperately needs, is a back patio with a comfortablish chair and a rickety table, shelted from the wind, with an awning in case it starts raining, not too distant from lunch and fairly near plenty of hot strong milk tea. The bamboo scaffolding and high-rise offices where drones burn the midnight oil is optional. An ashtray would be nice. Plus lamps, for when it gets dark. Everything would be so much better, and people would be a happy.


Dawdled for a bit on Commercial Street, where there are fewer tourists, and enjoyed the sunlight while puffing. It's Autumn, and it's gotten colder. The breeze bites a bit.
I should probably start wearing sweaters again.



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