Sampling the Local Flavour

A while ago when I watched a documentary on wabi sabi I remember having read somewhere on the side of the subject that the inhabitants of our humble island and Japan’s have tea, gardening and horrible weather in common. The other day in Turkey my sister got somewhat confused as to what country we were in (she’s small) when her existence is divided between two countries. Without much further ado, she’s at an Anglo-American School in Sofia, Bulgaria at the moment – which will naturally confuse anyone who’s read my about page. What in the name of everything sacred and saintly are we doing spread across Europe? We’re doing capitalism I suppose. And if life gives you capitalism, you squeeze it in someone’s face. Or just get the best of both….three worlds. I rarely have enough time to see all the things I want to see in Romania and Bulgaria; visiting anything else feels like a bit of a culture surge. Mr. Colman’s and Griffiths‘ entries on Romania along with Mr. Terrett are enough to convince anyone that people over there are good, the food is crap, everything is quite strange.

Romania’s had so many UK shops open, it confuses me too. There’s Gap, Tie Rack, Debenhams,  Peacocks, Marks and Spencer, Next, Oasis, Karen Millen, you also have the Royal Bank of Scotland in case you feel lonely and find yourself an expat. Starbucks and Costa are also part of the local landscape. I know some are just a sign of Globalisation and you might confuse Germany with the UK too if it weren’t for all the blonde people.

People drink a lot of beer, some might even put the English to shame.

Tea would lose the battle against coffee and the curry is replaced by the kebab house.

I often wonder where the hell I am when people around me speak strange languages (my transit airports are regularly Frankfurt and Munich, sometimes Amsterdam) and frankly, it becomes tiring to think about it after a while. I hate waking up to an alarm in the morning and saying something in a foreign language to a very confused boyfriend. And repeating the same thing, in case he didn’t get it the first time. Till I look around and think…wait. This is the UK! WHERE AM I? (Cue the ‘bad dream’ jokes here)

One day, if Romania were to detach itself from the continent and become an island in the middle of the Black Sea, then I’m sure it would look a lot like Britain but with more people hugging and kissing and less gardening. What I don’t understand is how come the UK has never warmed up (in a manner of speaking) to ICE TEA, this wonderful invention.

Apart from the fact that Pepsi distributes Lipton and Coca-Cola took care of Nestea, it’s a shame there’s barely any ice tea in supermarkets or any iced tea in places like Starbucks. Starbucks in Romania, as far as my knowledge goes, serves iced green tea and other such (or it used to). In the UK, someone looked at me funny when I asked for tea…with ice in it. Now I love my tea and would consider a sacrilege to put icea in Yorkshire or anything delicately flavoured but on a hot day, some ice tea is fantastic. Naturally I could do it myself but convenience and destroying the planet one pet bottle at a time is hard to beat.

Here are two (empty) samples of ice tea flavours from brands that had initially started with peach and lemon flavours only:

A mango-pineapple flavoured Nestea and a raspberry flavoured Lipton drink:

Sorry, the content has no fancy colour but the taste is just great (hence the empty bottles). I believe I shall smuggle some into the country next time. For the language nerd, ‘raspberry’ in Romanian is ‘zmeura’ but it’s so hard to pronounce I won’t even try to explain.