Take a hike and get to know your city
SIMPLICITY: NEW HUB MOISTURISES THE HEART
Each week Marie-Lais scouts another urban reach, tasting and testing alternative aspects to pique our curiosity about places and people we might have had no idea about. This week she wonders if it’s a matter of pills before swine.
Ihope I seem more deserving than I possibly am of my concoction. I taste Pawel’s enviously. Cyrildene’s Chinatown or New Chinatown in Johannesburg is bigger and brighter than the more dignified First Chinatown in Commissioner Street. Once through the dragon portals, it’s a noisy, dangerous combination of cars and passengers on all sides of the street. A woman in a colourfully sequinned mini passes with a chicken under her arm.
Down on the right is a block of flats, Hillview Heights, but it won’t help as a landmark because its entrance area has been enclosed to make a tiny shop. It’s next to the Bajia Supermarket with “Frozen Foods and Grains” in large letters.
It’s eleven, tea time. I don’t press my nose to the glass of the closed shop because the nose is sneezing and buried in a hanky. I look up to see that I’m under a plane tree bearing a spring load of fuzzy, hayfever-inducing conkers.
A minty car swings onto the pavement and Enny introduces herself, delivered with parcels by her son. Enny unlocks the glass door to the teeny place and her friend arrives to chat. I read the colourful posters with teas and their uses, faintly hoping for a hayfever cure. They’re long shots but the two that might have some bearing on my condition are the lavender that “moisturises the lung” and the osmanthus that “improves imports smelly.”
Enny indicates the available teas on another menu and here are many I’d love to experience: red bean milk tea; caramel crème tea; grass jelly milk tea; pearl chocolate; even pearl coffee – but I feel I should start with a seeming classic pearl milk green tea.
I hear Pawel asking Enny why he has to have pills in his tea. He settles on a “grapefruit tea with pills”, having been told they are made from sweet potato.
I’ve had many so-called bubble teas and once thought Happy Me’s Pomegranate Popping Pearls should be a diet staple. This one doesn’t taste much of green tea because the sweetish cold milk is a bit overpowering. Pawel’s has no milk and tastes divine. I order the almond tea to take away, not sure why but Enny is endearing and the place is called Simplicity, though maybe Perplexity to me.