Becoming Alice

In a country that claims tea to be its national drink, it is often amazingly difficult to actually get one. My personal obsession in terms of tea has always been Chai tea, and *bucks actually serves quite a good one, but rarely on the first try. To understand this, one must first consider the complexities of the *bucks menu, which includes a "Chai Latte", where they basically pour some mind-numbingly sweet powdered stuff in a cup of hot milk, which only remotely tastes like the Chai you would get at an Indian restaurant. Then they also serve good old plain English Breakfast Tea and a variety of herbal teas. And then there is also a kind of hot tea which has Chai flavoring and which is the one I usually prefer because a) it’s much cheaper and b) I needn’t fear overdosing on sugar because I can just add some brown sugar myself from those little stands where they dish up all kinds of fancy extras.

So I’ve been trying to order this drink for some time now, and I’ve noticed that ordering a "Chai Tea" will most certainly get me a "Chai Latte", which I then have to return to get the actual tea. I’ve also tried saying "I want a Hot Chai Tea", which most certainly gets me a hot English Breakfast Tea, because, as I suspect, the employees think I am mumbling some irrelevant gibberish between the words "hot" and "tea". I’ve now decided to be more instructive by saying: "Listen. I want a Tea. A Hot Tea. One with Chai flavouring." Today this once more resulted in being served the English Breakfast Tea variety, and when I came back to return it, the employee at the coffee bar remarked: "Oh, so you don’t want it anymore?"
I never wanted it in the first place, thank you very much.

To make up for this, there are some cafés which want to serve you tea even if you haven’t ordered it. I remember this one time when one Copy editor and I had our minds set on drinking Orangina, so I went up to the counter and said: "Two Oranginas, please". To which the employee replied: "Tea?", and I said: "No tea. Two", while holding up two fingers to signal both the number and my honest intentions. "Tea?" she asked again. I think she only just realized that they were selling the stuff when I just leaned over and grabbed two bottles from the counter myself.

"Have some wine", the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. "I don’t see any wine," she remarked. "There isn’t any," said the March Hare.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland