One night during my first weeks in Wellington, I went out for a big night with a bunch of my hostel-mates. This involved a lot of discussion about what we were all going to wear and then getting lost and texting each other from various locations in town (“@ Bodega. U?”) and then dancing around in this little underground club before, tragically, relocating to a very loud and sticky Irish pub that began to suck my will to live after about minute ten. We all stayed out very late indeed and everyone but me, as usual, was pretty well hammered by the time we dragged in. We seemed to be at a funny stage where we didn’t necessarily want to be out in public anymore, what with the shoes being so tight and the road being so long, but weren’t quuuite ready for bed just yet.
The British people were all sitting around talking about how much they’d had to drink that night and how those amounts compared to other amounts they’d had to drink on previous nights out, and how much they were planning to drink on future nights out. I was beginning to get sleepy when Big Mike…a very large, very tall, 22-year old rugby-playing lad, who had an accent that not one of the other Brits in the hostel could identify or imitate and which simply had to be heard to be believed…when this big brawny boy sat up straight on the moldering lounge couch and said, in vibrant, ringing tones: “I could fancy a cuppa.” All the other drunken revelers also sat up in their chairs, brightening at the thought, and went, “Oooh, yes, that’d be lovely!” and ran off to put the kettle on, leaving me alone in the room, stunned that these partiers had all of a sudden turned into doily-crocheting grandmas.
So, yeah. Do you drink tea? I mean regular black tea with milk and sugar in it, not Celestial Seasonings or green tea or chai lattes or whatever. I’ve always associated it with being very proper and with the Empress Hotel and haven’t known anyone who drank it regularly. I’d never even tasted it until I got here, being strictly a peppermint-with-honey kind of girl; the first night I met A, when I was going to see about renting a room with her, she offered me a cup and I accepted out of politeness and asked for about three sugars to mask the taste. It turns out that a mug of flavored milky water with two teaspoons of sugar in it is very yummy indeed, and when I began my brief liaison with a tea-loving Englishman I started having it, stereotypically, every evening after dinner. I’ve continued that little ritual even though I live with a Kiwi woman now (who still sometimes makes me tea because she’s nice like that) and I usually have at least one cup in the morning at work, too.
There is, of course, a budget for tea in the department and people will freak out if they can’t have the exact kind they like. The rift between the Dilmah people and the Bell people is deep and wide (I’m Bell people, myself, and I’ve cut down to just the one sugar) and then of course you have the green and fruit tea drinkers as sort of splinter groups. Sometimes I will be sitting in my office innocently minding my own business when I will hear sounds of laughter and merriment issuing from the “tea room” (where we also eat our lunch) and it will turn out that somehow, everyone in the office knows that it’s suddenly morning tea time or afternoon tea time and there they’ll all be, drinking their mugsful and chatting and reading the newspaper, looking up at me quizzically when I wonder what they’re doing, because isn’t it obvious? Such is the power of tea.
In fact, its power is such that something that every house and office I’ve been to in New Zealand has is an electric kettle, plugged in and ready to go at a moment’s notice. I’d seen those, of course, but I’d never owned one and couldn’t think of anyone I knew who had one in their kitchens. We didn’t have on at the Blue House or at the Green House, I’m certain, and I know I’ve never personally owned one in any of the other places I’ve lived. My mom doesn’t have one in her house. My dad doesn’t have one in his house, though of course he does have a stove-top coffee maker, which he once brought with us on a camping trip because there would be no place to plug in the Francis! Francis! but that is a different story altogether.
I was explaining this one day (in the tea room!), this lack of electric kettles in my life until I came to the southern hemisphere, and everyone got very upset. “But that’s ridiculous,” they said, furrowing their brows. “What do you do when you want to boil water? For tea?”
“I…yeah, I don’t know. Put it in the microwave? Or boil it on the…stove?” What did I do when I wanted to boil water for tea in a house—in multiple houses–with no electric tea kettles? Nothing! That’s what I did!
“Richest country in the world. Hmph,” said a Dilmah person, rolling her eyes.
I did a little research and found that the richest country in the world can buy plenty of electric teakettles if it feels like standing in line at Target, so that doesn’t explain why no one I know at home seems to have one. The fact that tea is a tool of imperalist oppressors sort of indicates why not many Americans I know drink it, but then of course I only know a couple of hundred of Americans, probably, so that’s not very accurate sampling. Maybe, when I leave the house of some friends whom I think are four-dollar latte drinkers, they pull out the Earl Grey and go to town. Maybe everyone is hiding their electric kettles underneath their sinks and they boil water on demand, with abandon, whenever they know I’m out of town for the weekend. I have no idea. All I know is that this is one of the itty bitty, fairly straightforward and predictable cultural differences that I enjoy the most about living in New Zealand and am glad to say have taken to wholeheartedly. And now that I think about it, I could fancy a cuppa right this minute.
Comments
23 responses to “I Fancy A Cuppa”
That was seriously my first reaction – you don’t have a tea kettle ? For real? How do you boil your water?
I put the kettle on at least 3x a day, even if I don’t actually drink anything! Haha. I’m actually a coffee person so its mostly for that, or for herbal tea, but Nate drinks normal tea so thats really the only way I started. I agree with you – milky sugar water is BRILLIANT! The reason I don’t drink it more often is ’cause its encouraging my sugar consumption, heh.
Or of course, maybe a milo.
well, i’m an american and i consume massive amounts of black tea. (i live in the south where everyone drinks sweet iced tea but i am assuming for discussion’s sake you just mean the hot kind) mostly at work to stay warm, b/c every office i work in is freezing and also b/ c office coffee usually tastes like battery acid. but i do like tea quite a bit. i take it w/ sugar, no milk. my preferred brands are twinings (i see it is made by bell) and tazo although bigelow wins out on the best mint tea (their “plantation mint”). these are household staples for me. i boil my water for tea either on the stovetop in a kettle or if i’m in a hurry, i just put a cup of water in the microwave. my friend lindsay used to always have a pot of tea on the stove. she drank hot tea all day long. aside from the 2 of us though, that is all the faithful hot black tea drinkers i know.
I love me some tea, although I don’t drink it very often, mostly because boiling water on the stove is kind of a pain. I’ll drink just about any type – black, green, whatever I have handy (usually black), and I usually skip the milk & sugars. However, ever since getting back from the UK, I’ve been drinking a lot more tea, and pondering what my life would be like with one of those electric tea kettles. Hmmm….
Also, the mental image of a bunch of drunken Brits getting all excited over making tea (much like us Americans would get excited over ordering a pizza or making a Taco Bell run) is absolutely hysterical.
I have a tea kettle, just not an electric one. My parents got me the electric kind once, and it sprung a leak and it was all kinds of wretched, so I went back to the stovetop kind. And I drink LITERS of tea, thankyouverymuch, preferably brewed by the pot rather than the cup because I am a colossal cheapskate and one bag (or ball or whatever) goes a much longer way when you make a potful (and as I’m sure you know by now making a pot of tea and sharing it is a great way to meet people when you’re traveling). Finally, I’m not so much into the milk and sugar myself unless I’m being super-girly (Earl Grey Blue, anyone?) I could go on and on. Tea is teh awesome.
And hey, while I’m going on a tear about tea, Penny says that according to the Lesbian Convention of Eighteensomethingorother she’s supposed to drink only herbal or maybe green tea. We’ve decided that green tea is for bisexuals, and Peter and I always have a lot of fun investigating people’s tea cabinets — ours is definitely a people person.
Well, you remember what our tea cabinet looked like at the Blue House. We were all lesbians, there, apparently.
That opening paragraph may be my favorite thing you’ve ever written. That I’ve read, of course.
I have a stovetop kettle (bright yellow) that I use these days for my French press coffee (morning) or my Bengal Spice tea (evening). The whistle works intermittantly, though, which can be a pain. “Oh! The kettle!”
My mother, a Southerner by birth, drinks what she calls “100 tea,” so-named because she likes the plain black tea – the generic ones that say “100 Tea Bags” on the box. =] She came to visit once, and all I didn’t want a whole bunch of black tea in the house, so I bought her “50 tea.” She never knew…
My mother drinks a few cups of tea a day — definitely of the “100 Tea” vvariety. Good ol’ Lipton’s! Maybe in the US it’s a Southern thing? I guess Southerners would be historically predisposed to appreciate tools of imperialist oppressors. I don’t have it every day, but one of the first things I bought when I had my own place was a tea kettle for the stove. I take mine with sugar and a dash of lemon juice.
We had to hunt far and wide for our kettle when we arrived in the US, but were so happy to find our stove top one that whistles, it is so quaint! I might even bring it home with us. You do know that plain old black tea is known as ‘gumboot’ in NZ? Like “I’ll have gumboot please”?
Tea for me. I loves the Good Earth, chai, green, Market Spice, Tummy Mint, Sleepytime, and I have some Earl Greyer right now that is so tasty with a splash of milk and a drop of honey. Nothing like a big mug of hot tea to hold close on a cold morning, or afternoon, or night. I’m drinkning tea right now!
When I worked at the UW, I bought an electric kettle for the break room, I left it there when I quit, people would use it to heat up their soup and not wash it out all the way, GAAHH.
Two of my sons like tea also, my 6 yr old will even ask me to take him to the local yarn and tea shop to taste the daily sample. They do Fancy Tea there with little cakes and fruit and maybe even finger sandwiches, he REALLY wants to do that some time, it’d be so cute to dress up all fancy and invite his little girlfriend to join us, what a hoot.
I’ve cut back on my tea habit in recent years — the caffeine was too much for me. I’m drinking more red tea and herbals now, with the occasional Jasmine or Earl Grey, just because it is so fantastic. It is true that I do not have an electric kettle, finding a pot on the stove to suffice, but I do have a set of tea things (cups, sugar pot, and all) and two more tea pots besides.
One of my favorite people, who happens to be British, introduced me to the electric tea kettle. We kept it in the office and had tea every afternoon. Somehow I thought it was an office thing, perfect for a place without a stove!
no kettle? what do you do when you want hot water for coffee? honestly? my mind is boggling.
i started doing the tea thing years ago when i was being basically bought up by my gramma and that was all she drank. ever. i think, she’s started drinking water now but at that point it was JUST tea. and she does the whole shebang with the the teapot and everything. just recently i realised that a) shes the only person i know that does that, everyone else just does the teabag and mug thing; and b) how much that tiny ritual means to me. and eventually shes going to kick off, and what the hell am i going to do then? adopt someone from the old folks home?
in fact, i think i’ll have a cuppa now.
Don’t get me wrong, being a former Seattlite I sure lurvs my coffee, but I’ve been a tea drinker all my life– probably because my dad is Scottish and my mum is southern American.
In the US we use a kettle on the stove, although I did use a mini electric pot whilst in college. I was tickled pink when I moved to Scotland to “discover” the electric kettle. It boils water so fast I can have a cuppa anytime I want. I usually drink Tetley’s during the day but switch to decaf English Breakfast by late afternoon or evening.
It seems as if this particular “tool of imperialist oppressors” is actually rather well liked! Being in the land of the aforementioned imperialist oppressors I am known to have a cuppa (or “brew” if you’re living up north) from time to time. My hands are up, I’m a traditionalist and do not take kindly to talk of fruit teas and the like… They smell devine, red berries are a particular favourite but to my (probably jaded) palette don’t have much taste, other than hot, red water… The real question (perhaps for the next journal entry) should be which biscuits with the tea, and should they be “dunked”??
Sharon and I both drink tea. A lot. She’s usually an earl grey or english breakfast drinker, but if you come to my house and want some tea, I will likely tell you to come over the cupboard and choose one, because I have at least ten different kinds, most of which are decaf. I generally take my tea black, no sugar, unless it’s chai, but lately I’ve been putting milk and sugar in my earl grey–mostly when Scott has tea too, because that’s how he likes it.
Here in Germany I have the following teas:
bagged early grey
bagged vanilla chai (not my favorite, but chai is surprisingly hard to come by here)
loose peppermint
loose jasmine green
loose pepper chai
and two tiny loose samples of chinese green and darjeeling, both from the lady at the tea shop who didn’t just sell me the pepper chai, she let me try it out first.
I have raw sugar, sugar cubes, and honey. I use one of those springy tea balls on a handle but am in search of this awesome tea bag/strainer thingee we saw at a cafe in Hannover.
I had a hot pot in college, but ditched that somewhere along the way and now use a stovetop kettle. My one at home sounds like a train whistle. I have to be careful with the one here because it doesn’t whistle and the stove is electric so the burners stay hot for a long time and I’m forvever in danger of boiling the kettle dry. Back in college Scott got me a ceramic tea pot for, what was it, my birthday? A dating anniversary? Alas, it broke, but now I have a cobalt blue one that matches my kitchen, and three others of the more decorative variety (one is shaped like a house) out on the sun porch.
Sharon has an electric kettle, and is one of the only people I’ve ever met with one.
We do have an electric ice tea maker (by Mr. Coffee, ironically) which we received as a wedding present my gosh, 13 years ago next week, and its still going strong. At first I was the only one who used it, but somewhere along the way Scott got hooked and now he makes batch after batch of Constant Comment iced tea in it.
Lately I am fascinated by these machines that you insert a little pod into and depending on the pod you get tea, or hot chocolate, or a latte, or drip coffee, or steamed milk or any of half a dozen other items. It seems like it must be very wasteful in terms of packaging and probably not very economical, and certainly all dehydrated and freeze-dried and unfresh, and yet, I want one desperately.
Sorry this was so long!
HEEE!
You know, I used to work in a cookware store and we stocked a few electric kettles and I was always mystified that anyone would buy something you had to plun in when clearly the task could be accomplished just as easily using regular stove top kettle, but buy them they did – usually people who had lived in England and liked to talk on their MOBILES instead of their cell phones like the rest of us. And in fact, my british friend said that Yes, in the UK, everyone has an electic kettle…but I never really got a satisfactory answer to my question of What is so hard about boiling it stovetop? I can understand the electirc kettle for the stove-less spaces, but seriously…why an extra appliance purely for the boiling?
But, tea gives me a stomach ache and makes my teeth feel funny, so it may be that I am just not a tea person, which may extend to tea appliances.
Oh, and my mom does have an electric kettle. (She’s not British in the least, so I don’t know how she comes by it. It’s to support her herbal tea in a mug habit, she doesn’t even do tea pots.)
In my household growing up in Australia we had an electric kettle for tea, coffee, iced coffee, the whole lot. We also had an electric stove which makes the kettle on top of the stove less of an option.
When I moved into housing with a gas stove, I’d buy a tea kettle, as it just seems to fit better boiling water over gas. Microwaving water for my tea makes the tea taste funny, it just does.
In my house in the US, one of the first kitchen purchases was a copper-bottomed tea kettle; a combination of having a gas stove (we passed up many houses that did not have gas, it’s a must have for me) and bugger-all counter space.
Kym, I envy your “”local yarn and tea shop to taste the daily sample.” visits! I don’t think I would ever leave such a shop as that.
It’s cold and drizzly here in New Jersey, and this entry is making me head upstairs for my own cuppa.
Really, stop boggling, you southern-hemisphere people. When coffee-drinking America wants tea, she heats it up on the stove. Duh. Either in a pot, or, if she has even a medium-well-equipped kitchen, or drinks a lot of tea, in the KETTLE. On the stove. Like a pot, but mostly-enclosed, with a spout that not only pours but in better models also WHISTLES when it’s ready and steam starts to come out. You may have seen these things.
Just, most in the US kettles don’t have the heating element built in. We generally have stoves in our kitchens.
Conveniently near the tea, and the tap, and the teacups.
Some of us microwave the water, because although it takes a little longer, it costs FAR less energy than turning on the (electric) stove.
(Tip: microwave in GLASS, not plastic (yuk!), and it will taste the same as when it was cold. If it still tastes different, it’s because your *kettle* is changing the taste, putting metal or scale or something in the water. Microwaving just makes water molecules wiggle faster. That doesn’t change the taste.)
Now, if you tell us that you Kiwis and Aussies don’t generally have _coffemakers_ in your houses, we in the north will be astounded.
Happy Thanksgiving, all.
We had an electric kettle for a while growing up, but then installed an “intant” hot water faucet at the sink. Of course, that isn’t actually hot enough to make a good pot, so my mom would but it into her iron Japanese tea pot, which she could heat up just a bit more on the stove. I have a nice red stove-top tea kettle when I’m at home (and my last roommate had a giraph one that hat a two-tone whistle), but here in Ghana I have had to settle for an electric one. Actually, for a while I just had a heating coil that I stuck into a pot of watter, but I finally aquired a cute pot with a funny blew chicken head when some other students were leaving. But, however you heat your water, my biggest peeve is still about making the tea in a pot rather than in a cup. Surprisingly I used to shun Lipton Yellow Lable, but as it is the only tea available at any reasonable price here I have actually come to think it is okay.