Reading Tea

I want to catch up on my reading this weekend. Been enjoying Smart Mobs by Horward Rheingold but I've been reading too slowly lately. I often use the bits and pieces of time - while waiting for my food to arrive and immediately after finishing eating - to do my reading. On weekends I'll park myself in a quiet cafe and spend one to two hours there engrossed in my book, while I sip a cup of tea.

I'm not particularly fond of American-styled coffee and hence I avoid places such as Starbucks or Coffee Bean. I prefer the old-fashioned kopi-tiam which serves good milk tea. This is rare in Jakarta. In fact people here normally drink local tea without sugar or milk. While "teh" would normally mean tea with condensed milk in Malaysia and Singapore, here one can hardly find a cafe that serves a smiliar cuppa - sometimes they don't even keep any milk! The kopitiam teh or the mamak teh tarik is what I miss most from home, since living here in Jakarta. But I have found at least one cafe opposite my hotel that serves Chinese-style tea with milk - the Arobusta cafe. It is one of my favourite haunts during the weekends. And I've spent many happy hours there reading and typing into my Jornada.

The worst places to drink tea are at Western cafes where they would just give you a cup of hot water with a Lipton teabag on the saucer - not even bothering to mix them together. But there are other delights in Jakarta - kopi tubruk (the local coffee with lots of sediments) and es jeruk (local orange juice). Or I can always go for a bottle of cheap Bintang beer.

A good cup of mlked tea with a good book. That'll make my weekend.