Chai

So, every year my city has this giant cultural festival/celebration called ‘Mosaic’.

I didn’t go last year, and the two years prior to that I was living in Saskatoon so this was the first time I had been in a while. I used to go every year growing up, though. There were four of us in total for the group I was going with, so we decided to each pick a ‘pavilion’ to attend and that’s how we’d decided which places to go to. Basically, each pavilion represents a different culture/country – usually they have performances, art, food, and music and sometimes other things specific to the country.

We decided on Korean, Greek, Caribbean, and Indian – my pick was Indian.

The Indian pavilion was great; they had Bollywood style dance performances all weekend and you could buy jewelry or get henna done. My favourite thing about that pavilion though is the food! I stuffed my fat, greedy face with veggie samosas, chutney, lentil dishes, and mango lassi and ice cream. Of course, it felt incredibly wrong to go to that pavilion and not grab a cup of Chai – so I did that too.

When Western people say ‘Chai’ they generally use it in the sense of ‘spiced tea’ but many Indian people I know use Chai as just a catch all term for tea in general, usually with milk. If you wanted spiced tea you have to specify that by asking for something like Kashmiri or Marsala Chai. The tea they served was Chai in the sense that it was a straight black tea made in milk. It was good though; I have no clue what kind of tea they used both in the sense of which brand and which type of tea. My guess, though, would be that is was an Assam as it had that malty sweetness that I generally associate with Assam. Plus an Indian black tea would only seem to make sense…