TEA

Never did I think so much confusion could arise about a drink like tea but since arriving in the South, i have learnt that a good old fashioned mug-teabag-hotwater-milk combo is not the only way you can have your brew.

If you watch this video, listen carefully at about 30 seconds in. That's me everyday.

http://youtu.be/aJCUUbwNzAA

Here in South Carolina, if you ask for a tea and expect a steaming mug of tetleys finest you're going to be thoroughly dissapointed. What you'd get given would be a cold drink, usually with ice. It looks like the iced tea that I find myself buying only when I'm somewhere boiling on holiday. However, looks can be deceiving and try as I might I've been unable to find it anything other than absolutely revolting. To me it tastes like someone's half made your tea, forgotten about it, let it go cold, remembered it again but discovered they are out of milk and said sod it and given you it anyway. Not good at all.

However people here love it! As in really love it. If there's a ever a function on with free food the drinks offered will nearly always be water, lemonade and tea. You can even get it in macdonalds.

To make traditional sweet tea you boil a load of water, add tea bags, and leave for 15ish minutes. Whilst its brewing away, mix an absolutely ridiculous amount of sugar with some water (the recipe I'm getting this from suggests dissolving two or more cups of sugar into three cups of water - goodbye any healthy aspects of this drink) and then mix it with your tea. This for me is where things start to go really downhill because now you're meant to leave it to cool to room temperature and then put ice in it! And more sugar! Madness.I see this as downright wrong, but they go crazy for it in the south so there ya go. 

I've also had the (dis)pleasure of trying bubble tea. I know you can get it at home but I think it's more popular here - again I just do not know why. Apparently we chose bad flavours (I thought mango and green tea would go together quite nicely) but I'm not sure it's disgustingness can be entirely blamed on the flavour. I've never had a protein shake but it's tasted how I imagine they taste, kinda off-milky but then with the added weirdness of black chewy balls in the bottom of it, which every now and then suddenly sneak up the straw at a surprising speed and half choke you. All in all it was not a good drink.

I have had one good tea-related thing and this was a LatTEA which was basically a pumpkin latte with no coffee involvement! I wish Starbucks did more stuff like this as their special Christmas drinks always sound amazing but always have coffee creepin around somewhere in them. Alas, I've only seen this in one cafe so I'm not counting it as a viable replacement for my beloved tea!

So unfortunately, whilst you can quite easily get sweet tea, unsweet tea, bubble tea, LatTEA, Arnold Palmer tea (lemonade and tea), green tea, cinnamon tea and a seemingly infinite amount of weird and wonderful types of tea, unless you're willing to compromise and settle for earl grey (I'm not), in most cases you won't be getting your cuppa. 

(Good job I came prepared.)

xxxxx