Barbecuing Tea

"I was in my apartment and the balcony door was open. Well, I just had to get out ’cause the neighbours downstairs were barbecuing tea at about 4:30. I knew I wasn’t getting mine until 6:30, so I just had to leave!"

These words were spoken by a classmate of mine while we enjoyed a lovely supper in a pub close to the university campus. "Barbecuing tea?" As much as I’d read about the customs of New Zealanders (which mostly came from a novel by Keri Hulme entitled "The Bone People"), I should have been prepared for this phrase. But I wasn’t.

When she uttered the words in her thick New Zealand accent, my mind began to fill with the image of a bunch of college students putting tea leaves—or, worse in my imagination, Lipton teabags—on a hibachi and lighting ’er up. I don’t know how burning Earl Grey smells, but I don’t imagine it to be good. So as she spoke I began to sympathize in my mind, "I’d get out, too, if my apartment were filling with the smell of burning tea!"

Then the latter part of her sentence struck me and I was jolted into the world of a New Zealander. "Tea" is more often a reference to the evening meal than it is to a beverage of steeped leaves. What she meant—in my American idiom—was that the folks downstairs were barbecuing their supper and it smelled so good that she had to leave, because she wasn’t getting her supper until two hours later.

It took me an extra second or two to laugh at her story because I didn’t properly know what "tea" meant right off. But I’m catching on now.

~ emrys