Tea

[angus]

Major FD.  Especially black tea that's hot with milk and sugar.

ewww.  Do you also put milk and sugar in your coffee??!

I can go either way.  I prefer coffee, but when I'm in the Far East, where a good cup of Joe is harder to find, I usually drink tea.  Hot, of course.  No milk, no sugar.

[angus]

Today ended up being a tea day.  I got up around 8 and instead of my usual half pot of coffee, I opted for tea.  I put water in the electric kettle and a few minutes later found a little bag and just as I was teabagging it my wife reminded me that we had some decent loose leaf that we brought back from China.  I felt like a stooge, but I played it smooth, like I wanted that English shit, but about halfway through the cup I poured it into the sink and broke out the good stuff.  The bag inside the metal canister hadn't even been cut yet.  I guess it has been in there, untouched, since our last trip to china 8 months ago.  Of course, we have a few other already-open canisters I bought at the Asian markets here, but I'd forgotten about that little one.  I decided to go whole hog and I put away the mug and broke out the good gilt-edge oriental small cups and the metal mesh ball, and dropped some leaves into it and steeped it right.  I ended up drinking about four small cups of that before we headed out to the nature day festivity that we'd planned.  As it happens, around noon we got hungry and the nearest fast food place is a little place where my wife always orders, in Mandarin, our food and they serve us copious, American-portion quantities of food on little styrofoam plates, and I had another two cups of tea there--it comes free and is always hot, although usually oversteeped--and I carried the second one with me into the adjacent Wal-mart as we shopped for toilet paper, dietary supplements, shampoo, and the like. 

I probably consumed only about half the caffeine that I would normally have consumed in a typical day because I didn't drink my usual half pot of very strong coffee, but I don't have a headache at the moment so it must have been enough.