You remember that epic dialogue from Om Shanti Om? “Itni shiddat se main tumhe paaney ki koshish ki hai, lagta hai har zarre ne tumhe mujhse milaney ke saazish ki hai.” Erm, that’d be the story of my quest for green tea Kit Kats. Yeah, it’s almost as crazy a story as this one, mind 😀
It was September 2009, the induction week of my MSc course. This girl from my corridor just got back from Japan, where she spent the summer teaching English. She picked up an assorted box of Kit Kat from Narita as souvenir (they do proper wacky Kit Kat flavours there!! Soy sauce flavour Kit Kat, anyone?), which she shared with everyone in the halls.
I, too, got one of the mini sized bars, but mine had a green wrapping. “Hmmm… Green tea flavour… Betcha it’ll be well bitter!” Despite my reservations I took off the wrapper and… WOH! The bars were a grassy colour, and not the familiar chocolate brown. “Ah, they must’ve been made with fresh lawn clippings!” Under the influence of the roasted green tea whiff, I took one bite and… I was in love! Intensely creamy with a subtle kick of green tea, you just can not fall for its idiosyncratic charms. And when dunked in espresso, it’s… the next thing to heaven!
There was no going back after that. I looked for it everywhere, in all Asian grocery stores in West Midlands and London, in Paris, in Lisbon, in Vienna, in Prague, in Budapest, in Bangkok, in Singapore, in Kuala Lumpur, in New York… You name it, I’ve probably checked. Yeah, every time friends/family went abroad, I twisted their arm(s) to look for green tea Kit Kat for me. But, you bloody get them in Japan − only.
Then, in October last year, a colleague was sent to Tokyo for the World Bank-IMF meeting (yeah, my day job’s far from the glitz and glamour of fashion :-p), and no prizes for guessing what I did next. Erm, to the point of harassment, I gotta say; I’m pretty sure he contemplated taking out a restraining order against me. I may or may not have been the reason why he received daily phone calls from work reminding him not to come home without completing his to-do lists :-p Bless, so petrified he was of calling in at work without my Kit Kats that he… hand carried them, lest his luggage got lost − and with it, my precious sweets!
So yeah, here I am, staring at my stash, content to the brim 😀
P.S. If you want to try them out, you can purchase them from here − totes worth it they are!
P.P.S. If you’ve a pressing sweet tooth, you gotta head to Japan. The confections there sound simply out-of-this-world. Indeed, I’m planning a trip there as I type… 😉