Hot Cranky People

For the last few years, I’ve been intrigued by the growing popularity of Boba Tea. Or Bubble Tea. Or Milk Pearl Tea. You know, the festive drinks with tapioca blobs.

Now, I have a hard enough time with thick pulpy juices, like the Odwalla Superfood and Mo’ Beta smoothie juice
things that Arlo loves. Seriously, they make me gag…partly because of the weird thick fuzzy texture and partly because of the story of his experience a while back with a Mo Beta that seemed to have “extra bits of juicy peach” which instead turned out to be slugs. Yes, slugs.

Slugs.

Anyway, I don’t like drinks with stuff in them, and yet the allure of the bubble tea was finally too much to resist. The stores are everywhere! It must be good, right? Yesterday we ate lunch at a restaurant directly across from Tapioca Express, one of the many many pearl tea places in town. I was facing the window and I watched the continuous stream of happy customers, exiting with their colorful cups and oversized straws. After lunch I decided it was time to try it.

I moseyed up to the counter and ordered a Peach Milk Tea. “Do you want pearls?”, the counter girl asked. “Yes!”, I said, excitedly, and she ladled a scoop of what looked like big black fish eggs into a cup.

She added some other stuff out of various pumps and then used a cool machine to seal a foil lid onto the cup. She shook it all up, handed me a giant straw and sent me on my way.

Oh my god, the horror.

I’ve never been so repulsed by a food texture, and yet strangely intrigued at the same time.

The big straw was fun. Mmmm…suck up some interesting sweet creamy peach tea…tasty, a bit too sweet, but tasty…but then…

THWOMP!

I had sucked up the first blob. Hmmm.

Chewy.

THWOMP! THWOMP! THWOMP!

It took me a full minute to chew through those.

It was at this point that horror won out over intrigue, and I was done.

Goodbye, Bubble Tea. I wanted to like you, I really did, but it’s just not going to work out between us.