My family is visiting me this weekend from New York! I stopped by a Chinese grocery store with my boyfriend in an excited frenzy to buy lots of groceries. I was so focused on the specific ingredients I needed to make my family a nice, homemade meal, I didn’t realize how thirsty I was till it hit me out of nowhere. Luckily my boyfriend was craving a specific drink at the same time.
“Do you know that Asian drink with the ball in it?” he asked. ”Oh yeah, bubble tea. The pearl looking things that are clumped together at the bottom of a drink?” I answered. ”No, no, it’s just one ball that’s stuck at the top of the bottle. It’s not edible and it’s like a marble,” he said.
“Um….what the HELL are you talking about?” I doubted him wondering what this non-Asian boyfriend knew that I, a full-Asian, did not.
He brought me over to the drink section and immediately pointed to an oddly shaped glass bottle with Japanese characters on the label. ”See? This is the one!” He points to the English words that read Ramune Carbonated Drink.
“Yeah…well, where’s the ball?”
“You’ll see!”
Fast forward to the parking lot. We just sit down in his car and we start peeling off the top of our bottles. I throw my top away and see a blue shiny thing stuck at the top of my bottle. “Well, what do we do now?” I ask. I look over and find my boyfriend pushing the blue shiny thing down with a white plastic stick. I hear a sudden pop and clunk, and there it is…the ball. My doubt turns into quite the excitement as I see the ball rolling back and forth every time my boyfriend moves his bottle. He takes a look over at my bottle and sees I already threw out my white plastic stick and chuckles while he helps me push the ball stopper down. I’m suddenly an excited 5 year old receiving a long awaited gift. I sway it back and forth for 20 minutes, tickled to hear the ball clink the bottle each time.
“See, I told you so,” my boyfriend grinned.
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