"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.

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the intention is to indicate complex flavours? Which would make it different from my coffee. I have tried home-roasting, Ethiopian country style, as taught to me by professionals a couple of years ago. Except I forgot one minor detail. They boil it on stovetop - I used a plunger.

Today is the day of the beverage.

teiibaggu

[http://users.livejournal.com/_twilight_/]

It must like you.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I've seen the multilingual teabag wrappers, but never thought to google the translations. Lol!

This all reminds me of my experience in a Thai restaurant in El Paso. I ordered green tea. They brought me a cup of luke warm water with a tea bag in it. The tea was distinctly not of the green variety. I told the waiter that what he'd brought me wasn't green tea. He went back to the kitchens and soon, out came an older Asian woman (the owner?). She insisted that it was green tea and pointed to the label on the bag, which was green. That settled that, in her mind, and she returned to the kitchen. There was also a language barrier.