Bubble Tea

We went to China Town in Oakland yesterday. It was bustling and so many old folks were there. We were terrifically lucky to find a parking place right in the middle of everything. Right away I hauled DeeDude into tiny little grocery stores. We marveled at all the stuff for sale. Lots of different sorts of vegetables that I’d never seen before.

I’d been wanting to try some Bubble Tea for the longest time. We spied a tiny little place and were the only customers there. They must have had 100 different flavors offered. I let the guy choose for me when I said I wanted something red and sweet. DeeDude had Strawberry and I got Taro Root. Mine actually ended up to be purple, but it was fantastic. DeeDude liked his too. The hilarious thing about this drink are the huge pearl tapiocas at the bottom of the cup. You have this huge straw and the tapiocas pop up into your mouth so that you’re eating and drinking from the same cup. It’s absolutely hilarious.

After we were done we went to another grocery store and I bought us some tapioca and a package of the straws. They had white and black ones…we’d had the black in our drinks, but DeeDude got turned off from the description on the package which was “starch balls”. He said, “What is this stuff?” I said, “It’s tapioca. It’s what I use to make pudding except this is bigger.” But, no starch balls so we bought the white version. Fine. I looked it up in Google and they said tapioca is the starch from the root of the cassava plant.

When we got back on the street and in the crowd of folks waiting to cross at a streetlight noticed a bunch of young folks and they all had a plastic cup of the Bubble Tea. I’m not sure what we’ll use for the tea part. I don’t think it really matters, but there are powders available on the internet. We couldn’t seem to find anything yesterday in the stores, so I’m wondering if it’s a mostly no-brainer. Tea. And, Milk. That’s it. The attraction is the bubbles at the bottom of the drink. I looked it up on Wikipedia to get more information.