Chai, Anyone?

Found this very entertaining blog yesterday titled Aziz in India. It is written by one Aziz Sunderji, a Canadian who's working for an NGO in India. Funny, yet informative. I especially like his description of one main preoccupation in that part of the world -- chai drinking -- because it reminds me of my visit to Pakistan many years ago.

Chai is tea mixed with freshly boiled milk. And you cannot find it anywhere else except in the Indo-Pak sub-continent, at least not the way they prepare and consume it. It was the only thing that I looked forward to every morning while I was there. I can still remember the mini-argument I had with a fellow traveller, Saiful, at the chai table.

Saiful is a Chinese (or Chini in Urdu) and he was very proud that the same word also meant sugar. He concluded that the Chinese people were as sweet as sugar in our chai, so we argued about that over a cup of piping hot chai. I was very close to giving up when the chai-wallah (with the help of an interpreter friend) told us the Urdu word for Malay was Malai which also meant the cream of the milk boiling in his pot. So that little storm in a chai cup ended in a truce and another round of chai!

If there's anything that could make me go back to Pakistan one day, it would definitely be the delicious chai.