Tapioca Milk Tea (タピオカミルクティ) – Panda Peng Peng

It’s another three day weekend, and this weekend I’m spending it in Aomori! Specifically hanging out in Aomori City and then making a day trip to Hiroshima. I’ve become quite a meticulous travel planner, and although I could have gotten boba in Sapporo, when I was planning my trip, I saw that there was one, yes one, place in Aomori City that has boba. I also found a boba spot in Hirosaki, so the tentative plan was to get Day 1 boba in Aomori, and Day 2 boba in Hirosaki.

The boba shop in question is actually a Taiwan cafe. I found it a bit weird that Aomori City doesn’t have a proper boba shop, and the one Gong Cha I saw on Google Maps was quite a while away. Nevertheless, I’m glad there was actually only one choice, since I’m not here for very long.

The cafe offers a variety of Taiwan teas and drinks, but for boba, they only offer brown sugar milk or milk tea. Of course, I’m getting the milk tea option.

I’m getting a sense of Deja vu, as I saw the cashier prepare the drink. It seems like she took a prepackaged bag of drink and boba, pulled it out of the microwave, added some milk and ice, and poked the straw in. I suppose this is not surprising from a cafe that offers many things for the boba not to be fresh, but I hoped the tea would be fresh…

Anyway, I attempted to mix in the drink on the bottom and the milk poured on top, but the first sip was still pretty sweet. The tea flavor tasted almost roasty, reminiscent more of coffee than tea, but after drinking it, doing some shopping and coming back to it, it actually had a really herbal tea taste to it. The boba is chewy, but almost too bouncy. Not hard in a stiff and uncooked way, but more of a takes-effort-to-chew kind of hard.