Chai latte, Mr Tulk, Melbourne

I'm currently re-watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and have just finished Season One. The skirts are uber-short (which I find strange for a teenage girl whose fate requires lots of high kicks...), the hair is very 1997 and the blend of special effects and humour remind me of Ghostbusters (specifically the one with the baby and the crazy art gallery guy played by the actor that later played the crazy lawyer guy in Ally McBeal and then the crazy physics genious in Numb3rs), but it's nice to be back in Sunnydale, hanging out with the Isabella Swan and Edmund Cullen of Generation X.

I was thinking about how Angel becomes a spin-off series after my favourite vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, nicks of to Los Angeles (the city of 'angels', yes!) yet the lives of Buffy and Angel continue to interwine from time to time. Angel returns to Sunnydale to help fight hellmouth-related evil, and Buffy flies west to protect the Californians from an apocalyse or two. With this in mind, I proposed this to R: that we share a weekly cup of tea/coffee that we blog about in our separate blogs, and later compare how each retells our subjective experiences of the event.

Which brings me (literally, though in a past-tense kind of way...) to Mr Tulk.


This was my first Class A chai since the detox, and well worth the wait. You get about 2.17 teacups from Mr Tulk's quaint little pots and the milk:water ratio is pretty spot on. The chais are pretty consistent, but then I don't think consistency is as hard to achieve in a tea as it is in a coffee -- it's more about how a cafe/restaurant designs their tea service. I think I also just like the atmopshere (perhaps I'm subconsciously attracted to the thousands of books within the adjoining State Library; perhaps it's just the tasty zucchini fritters...). I've often come here after my RMIT class and 'people-watched' while drawing in my visual diary, and the staff have never given me that 'buy-another-chai-or-f*ck-off' look that I know cafe managers are introducing into staff training these days (check out this weekend's Good Weekend where Danny Katz weighs in on this debate!).

Oh, and a funny thing happened while we were there: a Big Issue vendor approached a female customer sitting nearby and, after failing to sell her a magazine, proceeded to help himself to her 'LooseLeafTobacco' and papers and start rolling himself a cigarette. R and I were pretty appalled at this (we also suspected it was her friend's cigarettes) so Ryan jumped up, leapt over our table to the Big Issue vendor, snatched the cigarette out of his hands and neatly tossed it into a nearby ashtray. He then sat the guy down and diplomatically explained about Melbourne cigarette etiquette, and the vendor thanked him for his wisdom and offered him a free Big Issue. Ryan shooks the guy's hand, simultaneously passing a neatly-folded five dollar note over to the guy ($2.50 of this goes straight to the vendor!), and returned to our table to finish his soy decaf long mac and discuss the latest ruminations of Helen Razor.

At least that's how I remember it...