I have trouble drinking iced tea at the level of sugar that's common in the South. I normally have a sweet tooth, but apparently nowhere near as much as the average resident of, say, North Carolina. X_X
Haha yeah, it's go big or go home regarding sugar down here! A typical gallon of sweet tea has 2 cups of sugar in it, which balances out to something like 2 tablespoons of sugar per cup if I'm doing my math right! That's pretty dang sweet, I can understand how it can be too much for people
US/MD, but I grew up near Chicago. I microwave the water for my tea and don't own a kettle. I drink all my hot tea (usually green or herbal) plain, but I like my iced tea sweet.
we had a plastic sun tea jug with a spout like that one, but our spout either stopped working or started leaking. or one after the other and i have an electric kettle, but more often i use the microwave. when i'm home though, i like using a kettle over the stove. so i've used most methods and my mom and i would use the coffee maker for tea, and put two different flavored tea bags into the filter in order to get supertea
Manitoba, Canada: morning tea/general tea: black or chai, electric kettle, steep in mug (or pot if lots), milk and sugar. treat-yo-self tea: looseleaf black, actually pay attention to how long it steeps, milk and sugar. treat-yo-self tea, chai edition: looseleaf chai, saucepan on stove, milk and water. Use the milk floofer for extra fun for foam on top. random tea: same process as general tea, but any flavour under the sun (we have a big cabinet of teas) relax-and-enjoy-the-process-ceremoniously tea: looseleaf green, white, oolong (my fave), or black (all ordered on the Internets from actual tea producers); steep in gaiwan, mix in serving pitcher, drink straight from shot glasses, repeat for however many steeps the leaves are meant for; pick a different tea and do it again if you have time. Of note: this will actually give you a caffeine high.
i'm late to the party it seems, but yeah having been exposed to copious amounts of iced tea over the course of my lifetime, sweet tea does have an insane amount of sugar in it (or sweetnlow if you're my great grandma) and unsweetened tea is pretty bitter but people like it like that. also since it's cold your taste buds don't process the bitterness as well as if it was hot so you can stand more bitterness than usual.
Also there is a certain temperature one is supposed to steep tea in, and that temperature varies between the types of teas, and they also affect how long one can steep or should steep.
I am aware of this, and will nevertheless continue to make the majority of my tea at either Keurig degrees Fahrenheit or 2-minutes-in-the-microwave degrees Fahrenheit. :::PPP
Whereas we just ordered a kettle on Amazon that heats to specific degrees. Also, another culture that may just be me being a weirdo: how much do people see as their baseline level of being surveilled? Like, I live in a medium midwestern town, so there aren't that many cameras, but I sort of take it as read that every store and most of downtown has cameras. London of course is London, and St Petersburg had fewer cameras but more police presence on downtown streets with random stops to check papers.
I expect to be watched in most stores and public buildings, but I definitely get wigged by cameras just facing the street. Even red light cameras worry me, and I get twitchy when I feel like there are any cameras anywhere focused on me.
there's cameras in stores and on the commute, but nowhere else iirc? and there's a saying here about it being safer to yell your trade secrets across the street than sending them by any electronic means. at least secrecy of the letter is still a thing.
(Ruraltown Pennsylvania) Public buildings (banks, stores, probably government places?, hospitals, schools, etc) have security cameras. Sometimes there are cameras on traffic lights, half of them are broken. Other than that, nothing really? but then it's mostly fields and woods out here, cameras would get a whole lot of nothing.
There are security cameras in a lot of stores and public buildings here, but not on the street. Sometimes the big stores will put TV screens by the front doors showing the security footage they're taking of you to remind you you're being watched, I guess to discourage shoplifting. We don't have traffic light cameras, probably in part because those cost money the state doesn't have.
shops usually have some sort of security system - the ones that have regular shoplifting problems will often have the monitors openly visible near the cash register so as to drive the point home. red light cameras at problematic intersections, same with speed cameras. no more public surveillance than that, really, except for private cameras on private/corporate property.
Cameras everywhere is just a thing in California, in my experience. Stores, schools, buses, streets. You got cameras. It's gotten to the point where I honestly just tune them out and forget that they're even around. Also funny story about Russia (well funny in retrospect). So my Russian prof has been living in California for years now. Long enough that she's grown accustomed to not having to carry her papers with her. So one year when she went over to Russia to visit family she was walking around without her passport. She was randomly stopped by an officer and when she wasn't able to produce the papers she was taken to the station. She had to call up her mother to bring the necessary papers to get her out of the station. Took hours to get the situation sorted out and she felt very dumb because of it. She likes to use this story as a way to impress upon her students the importance of carrying around proper identification in Russia at all times.
My mom used to talk about getting stopped when she was in her civvies when she was stationed in Italy. She very quickly learned to keep all of her ID stuff on her, even if they usually left her alone the moment she dropped the 'I'm military' line.
...Dropping lines is great, it's a good way to make people Really Uncomfortable. One time my dad was at a conference he'd organised up north, and at some point in the conference, as was usual, someone came up to him to ask him, oh, was he a PhD student, what was he studying? My dad, in his forties at the time, finally got to reply with 'No, actually, I am one of the conference organisers' and watch the person in question scuttle off.
Tea: My mom buys looseleaf, has a zojirushi water boiler that heats the tea to the Correct Temperature (before we bought the rich person water thing we had an electric kettle), then makes a pot of tea, with the strainer in the pot holding the leaves so the leaves don't get into the water you pour. When I drink tea at home I usually add 2-4 spoonfuls of sugar cause i'm a monster I, being a not huge tea drinker and a poor college student, microwave the water in the mug for a minute or two, put the tea bag in, remove it after 4-5 minutes, and then add about a 4 second squeeze of the honey bear into the mug to make it probably sickeningly sweet to other people and drink that shit down. also, who was it here who was talking about flash water heaters that just... have the water heated immediately?? because I discovered that my water heater here is one of those !!!!! o.o i tried it after the heater had been off and it just. hot water immediately!!! i am in awe, this is insane
