"Between the phone calls and text messages / the air must be thick with words / but not between us"

[larryhammer]

Here's a curious multilingual tea-bag wrapper:



Going line by line:

Trà Xanh
日 ??? 绿 茶
Green Teabags   BAN CHA
テイーバツグは

The first line is, as Google readily explains, "green tea" in Vietnamese. The second line is simplified hanzi in a cursive enough script that even our Taiwanese soon-to-be-former-Sometimes-Roommate can't read the second character, giving us the reading "sun/day/Japan ??? green tea". Ban cha is in Japanese a kind of toasted green tea. But the curiosity is that last line, teiibatsugu wa -- the first in katakana, the last in hiragana, marking the topic of the label. My only guess here is to read that ツ as a small tsu (not at ALL clear), making it teiibaggu -- a startlingly Engrished "tea-bag".

And all I wanted was a single cup of tea.

---L.