Today I decided to have a Bubble Tea, I got watermelon with lychee, no tapioca.
So I’m moseying back to the office, sucking on my Bubble Tea but all the jellies are in a huge bunch at the bottom and won’t suck up the straw. I tried to suck really hard, didn’t work, suck harder, didn’t work. Then I pinched off the top of the straw with my teeth to try to get better suction traction. I sucked super hard and suddenly a huge blob of Bubble Tea came up the straw and shot like a rocket up my sinuses.
I was standing in the middle of a very busy escalator and didn’t want to look like a spaz so I tried to just take it till I could get somewhere less busy. Then the Bubble Tea started pouring out of my nose so I pinched it shut and my eyes started watering like crazy. I got off the escalator and made it to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I had pink Bubble Tea oozing out of my nose, my eyes were all red and watery and my mascara was running down my face. I coughed and hacked and blew my nose trying to get it all out.
Back at my desk my ears started bubbling and making noises so I know some got in there too. For the rest of the afternoon I kept blowing bits of pink chunks out of my nose.
When I got home I did a real Neti Pot and bits of congealed pink snot came out.
So if you’re wondering what it’s like to have a Bubble Tea Neti Pot, it’s not good.
I want you to know, Floaty, that I am <snerk> entirely sympathetic <heh> to your ordeal…<insert slightly muffled gales of laughter>
Sorry, I know it sucked (not to mention blew), but the mental image you painted was irresistible.
By way of apology, I will admit that I also had an incident with watermelon bubble tea today. I got one on the way home; it was basically a watermelon slush with tapioca pearls in the bottom. Very refreshing in the heat…until I managed to slork back a couple of pearls that had actually frozen together down there, and they got stuck in the back of my throat like a pill that won’t quite go down.
They weren’t blocking my airway or anything, but they were cold, and in a couple of seconds, brain freeze started setting in. So there I was, sitting in traffic, swallowing and coughing, sucking in breaths of furnace-like air from the window, trying to dislodge them. Eventually–about the time the vise finished closing on my brain stem–they warmed up enough to get unsticky, and I managed to swallow them. The headache started to ease up a few minutes later, and was gone by the time I got home.
I guess the lesson we both ought to take from this is to be more careful about trying to drink basically solid objects. (Or maybe that the artificial watermelons are out to get us.)
Although it did feel like one went up there, it didn’t. At first I though “oh crap, I’m going to have to go to the hospital and have them get this thing out of my sinuses” but after a while I could tell that it was only the frozen, slushy liquid.
I went to Wikipedia to find out what bubble tea is, because while I’ve heard of it, no one has ever described it to me and I’ve never seen it.
The question that’s stuck in my head is, why is it called bubble tea when there ain’t no bubbles in it? Or is that a mispronunciation of this “boba” stuff?
“Boba” refers to the little gummy, sweet blobs of tapioca that you put in the drink. By extension, it now often refers to other, non-tapioca, sweet blobs you put in the tea, like Floaty’s jellies or popping boba (which are little gelatin capsules full of juice or other fruit-flavored liquid). The tapioca blobs may also be referred to as “pearls”, as I did.
The “bubble tea” appellation supposedly comes from the bubbly froth you get when you shake the drink vigorously, which you are supposed to do when preparing it. It may be, however, that the similarity between “bubble” and “boba” resulted in people conflating the two and helped the term catch on. The shaking is ostensibly to blend the flavors properly, but it also serves the purpose of keeping the boba from sticking together in a clump in the bottom. Floaty’s cautionary tale should make it clear why this is an undesirable thing.
Aaaaaand, I failed utterly at the neti effect, but did manage to dribble a fair bit when I was trying to spear the last few semi-frozen blobs. Orange, on a purple top, gives a nice tie-dye effect.
I had never heard of Bubble Tea til now, still don’t know what it is. I have learned something today though and that is it’s not something to lightly snort around with.
I might try it, think I’ll look for a place that sells it after I drop the kids off at school.
The other day, I was at one of those self-serve yogurt places, and on their toppings bar were four different flavors of “bobo”, which were more like those gelatin capsules of juice you were talking about. Haven’t had bubble tea, but I like the gelatin “boba” and used to drink this flavored sparkling water with little bits of jelly in it when I was in high school, so I’d probably appreciate the texture oddity inherent in bubble tea.
Speaking of things that are unpleasant when in the sinuses: I once came down with a pretty severe case of the flu within hours of eating chicken and corn chowder. You’ve never been truly miserable until, hours after puking, you manage to blow your nose and corn kernels come out.
It’s easy enough to make! They sell dry boba (and giant straws) at most Asian markets. It does take a while to cook up so I do a bunch at once and freeze it in 1-drink-sized portions. You can put giant tapioca pearl in a lot of drinks - makes everything more fun.
My first bubble tea, a boba hit me with in the back of the throat with great force (right in the uvula I think) and I coughed and hacked for 5 minutes. In front of people I reaaaallly would have liked to seem cool in front of (this was 10th grade).
I am going to have to find a place that does bubble tea near so I can try it in earnest. It’s intriguing and I am imagining something akin to a cross between Thai iced tea, traditional “Asian restaurant” black teas, and those fun squishy boba.
There’s a tremendous variety out there, some of which don’t really bear any resemblance to tea at all. The one in my “incident” above was basically an artificial watermelon flavored smoothie, for example.
My personal favorite, though, is iced jasmine green tea with tapioca pearls. Of course, it looks a bit like swamp water with giant frog eggs in it, which some people might find slightly off-putting.
