Do you like drinking bubble tea? My answer is – yes, I do and I like drinking it so much that I drink it every day. Indeed, I like sipping bubble tea, but I cannot find the type of bubble tea that I want anymore.
My first cup of bubble tea was probably because it was “fashionable” at the time and it was sold by “Comebuy”. How many of you have heard of it? Compared to the current drinks, bubble tea in the past actually was not tasty. I felt it was just a simple combination of milk powder with tea and sugar, but why would I drink it? It is because at the time bubble tea, then also known as Taiwan’s “handshake” beverage, was not as common as nowadays in Macau.
In my memory, “Comebuy” was the first brand of bubble tea that I got to know when I was in Primary 6, which was close to my school and my home. At that time, a cup of bubble tea was not as expensive as it is now, which is at least 30 patacas a cup. As I remember, then it was less than 20 patacas. However, I was not able to afford it when I was a primary school student. But I was so envious of some of my classmates holding a cup of it almost every day that I saved some money which I was supposed to spend on my lunch. And every weekend, I would run to buy the “Comebuy” bubble tea with my sister, and enjoy it next to the kiosk. Although it was precious to us, we could not finish the drink, because we did not dare tell my parents that we had bought a cup of bubble tea, so every time we could not finish the drink, we would put it on the stairs in our building secretly since at that time we assumed that parents would never allow us to drink “milk tea” which actually was not a real milk tea. However, one day we stopped doing that after I heard a neighbour shouting “who puts the rubbish on the stairs every week”.
Time passed by, and although nowadays bubble tea has become so common that we can find it on almost every street in Macau, we cannot find “Comebuy” anymore in the city. Although I can buy many different kinds of bubble tea nowadays, the special atmosphere of how we got our bubble tea back in our primary school years has disappeared. The “fashionable” habit has become just a memory.
