For many people, both tea lovers and muggles non-tea lovers, bubble tea is a wonderful little treat that has the potential to put a smile on the sourest of faces. At least...most of the time. Let me start off by saying that American and Japanese bubble teas are TOTALLY different things. The American version is typically a smoothie with tapioca pearls at the bottom and sometimes some matcha powder. There are always exceptions, but this is the most common. Japanese, authentic, bubble tea actually contains...wait for it...tea! Along with sugar, milk, and tapioca pearls. Some variance, but again that's typically what you get. Now that we know the difference, I shall begin my tale of tragedy and woe. There's a rather overdone little shop in a nearby town that serves only two things, macaroons and - gasp - bubble tea! I was very excited and since I enjoy both American and Japanese style bubble tea - I thought I was surely in for a treat. I don't know what I was expecting. The shop looks like a 90s magical girl anime exploded. Everything is pink with accents of black and white stripes. Cartoon cat stickers and large decals all over everything. Doilies and frills and cutouts of Paris – the only food they serve is macaroons in a thousand different colors, it's like walking into lolita nightmare. But first impressions aside, I was still excited by the prospect of bubble tea, you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, right? Rather than doing an American or Japanese style bubble tea, the shop decided to combine the two. The result was mixing VERY tannin-y black tea with milk and artificial fruit flavoring and then pouring the whole thing over ice and tapioca pearls. The tannins curdled the milk. I'll say that again. The tannins. Curdled. The milk. The artificial flavoring tasted like cherry medicine with cinnamon (it was supposed to be honeydew!) and when you add those flavors and textures together it was sort of like drinking incredibly tannin-y cherry-cheese-medicine-paste, like something cooked up in a hotel room at an anime convention. I honestly don't know how you can screw up bubble tea so badly, but what is more horrifying still is that there were many people buying these horrible drinks. There are people out there now whose only experience with bubble tea is that...thing, that terrifying acidic monstrosity, that weeaboo fever dream! Heaven help us.