Taking a teacup on a stroll in Chicago

  • Once again, I’m attempt­ing the dif­fi­cult maneu­ver of get­ting a hotel cof­feemaker to yield a sat­is­fac­tory cup of tea, this time in the Hamp­ton Inn out­side Chicago. Greg and I are on one of our occa­sional quick trips here to enjoy god­daugh­ter time and catch a lit­tle of that Chicagoland swank, if we can get it. But that’s why I have to keep try­ing Big Sci­ence to get the desired result. It ends up being more com­pli­cated than you’d think to get a decent cup of tea in a hotel.

    As I men­tioned back here, the prob­lems are:

    1. You can send for room ser­vice, but it costs a bloody for­tune. A carafe of four lit­tle cups of tea might cost you $20. And know­ing you’ve been totally ripped off will elim­i­nate the bliss of even the finest cup of tea. Solu­tion: Skip room service.
    2. The in-house cof­feemaker comes with a teabag or two, but it’s usu­ally dreck. Solu­tion: Buy some good tea once I get into town. (Like I really needed a rea­son to do that.)
    3. The in-house cof­fee stuff doesn’t include much sweet­ener or any milk. Solu­tion: Bring­ing sweet­ener isn’t that hard, but the milk thing is tricky. In this case, I brought a con­tainer of milk from the free break­fast and stowed it in the room fridge.
    4. The in-house cof­feemaker has been used for such a plethora of cups of cof­fee that not only is the carafe per­ma­nently redo­lent of cof­fee, but so is the fil­ter bin, the water recep­ta­cle and prob­a­bly the plug and the on/off switch. Now, I’m a drinker of the bean just as I am of the leaf, but tea with a hint of cof­fee isn’t tea any­more. It should be called some­thing else, like “teafee” maybe. And then it should be poured down the drain, because it tastes awful. Solu­tion: Don’t use the carafe, take out the fil­ter holder and just hope for the best.
    5. Hotels either pro­vide ceramic cof­fee cups which, again, make tea taste like cof­fee, or they give you silly lit­tle sty­ro­foam cups, which kill the ambiance. Solu­tion: Bring your own teacup.

    At about this point, you lose almost every­one. With all the other stuff you have to worry about before a trip, you have to try to stuff a teacup in your suit­case with­out it get­ting bro­ken? And in these days when you know all your lug­gage is being x-rayed, are you sup­posed to NOT be para­noid think­ing about what the baggage-screeners will make of some­one trans­port­ing teacups all about the coun­try willy-nilly?

    So I had given up on the idea when we got here. Find­ing out that the room included a real fridge (as opposed to a mini-bar) started to raise my hopes, because it meant I could man­age to keep milk cold with­out hav­ing weird adven­tures with either cup of milk in the ice bucket or com­pli­cated machi­na­tions with the mini-bar. (For those who don’t know, the mini-bars have a sen­sor under each item. Move that Snick­ers bar or tiny bot­tle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and if you don’t replace it in about one minute, you’ve bought it. So try­ing to insert your own items with­out buy­ing any of theirs is sort of like a board game for grown-ups.)

    But I still didn’t have a teacup. So I had writ­ten off my chance of unwind­ing with a good cuppa tea at even­tide, until Greg and I hap­pened across a liq­ui­da­tion sale at the Chicago Ath­letic Club. That may sound like an unlikely place to pick up some­thing so ele­gant, but the impor­tant thing to men­tion is that the Chicago Ath­letic Club was one of those Old Money, old boy clubs with wing­back chairs, cav­ernous fire­places and dark wood every­where. The Club had been there since the 1890′s, and now that they were going some­where else, they needed to sell off rooms­ful of armoires, book­cases, chairs, sofas, desks, tables … and China. I sup­pose a per­son used to be able to eat and stay at these clubs if they wished, and the sec­ond floor had ver­i­ta­ble moun­tains of the every­day China and the good China, all for about a buck apiece.

    I’m not the type that goes mad for a bar­gain, but I hope I know an oppor­tu­nity when I see one. The China was all really well-made — clas­sic and under­stated in design, hefty and solid in its con­struc­tion. I swept up a good teacup right away, and then just kept think­ing of other pieces that have been miss­ing from our table­ware. Yes, why not get some more saucers, and a cou­ple mid-size plates, and some small crocks, and a mess of spoons to replace all the ones that the spoon-fairies have spir­ited away over the past ten years?

    All very sen­si­ble of me, I’m sure, but it meant that after I’d paid for my trea­sures, I had a prob­lem. The sell­ers didn’t have any bags, and I couldn’t risk putting the teacup on top of all the other plates and stuff in the book­bag I was tot­ing. So I had to walk the four blocks back to the car just car­ry­ing the teacup in one hand. I tried to look non­cha­lant and breezy, sashay­ing down Michi­gan Avenue with teacup in hand, but it really seemed kind of bizarre to me. Chicagoans are evi­dently used to see­ing things much stranger than that, because no one even gave me a sec­ond look, but I was still oddly tempted to just start thrust­ing my teacup out in front of me and say­ing “Tea for the tourist? Tea, ma’am? Tea, sir? Just a lit­tle tea? Lipton’s will do,” just to see what would happen.

    You never know. It’s a classy town. I might have got­ten some good For­mosa Oolong from a thought­ful native with a Ther­mos. But that didn’t hap­pen, so I came back to the Hamp­ton Inn to get my twi­light cup of tea. I usu­ally don’t have any this late, but under the cir­cum­stances, I felt like it was my destiny.

    In the end, I can report that there wasn’t any­thing I could do with the in-room cof­feemaker to keep it from mak­ing “teafee.” I had to skip it alto­gether and heat the water up in the microwave, which for some rea­son seems like cheat­ing to me. (Where’s the art in push­ing but­tons to make the water hot? Where’s the chal­lenge in wait­ing 1:30 min­utes? It’s just so slip­shod and bour­geois.)

    But now I have over­come every obsta­cle, and I have before me a good cup of tea with milk and sweet­ener in a highly respectable, non-coffee-polluted teacup. Ahh­hhh.

    I won­der if I can get a diges­tive bis­cuit anywhere.


    Related posts:

    1. The morn­ing after — ahhh.
    2. Star­bucks blogging
    3. Fri­day tea report
    4. Decem­ber 26
    5. Life as it should be

    September 20th, 2007 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Just Another Jim 09.20.2007

    The other solu­tion is when in Amer­ica do like all good Amer­i­cans and drink cof­fee ;)

  • Grace

    Well, I’m a switch-hitter, but I pre­fer tea for med­i­ta­tive times. Plus, I kind of think I was just start­ing to take it as a per­sonal chal­lenge to fig­ure out how to have tea.

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