Juice

For a few weeks now, I've been excited. What have I been excited about, you ask? A huge orange-and-green sign hung across the street from my gym. It read, in huge, white, English letters:

Coming soon!
 Actually, you know what, that doesn't really do the sign justice. See, it really looked more like this:

  ...except the lemon was an orange, there was a bunch of Chinese writing at the top, and the Jamba Juice logo was nowhere to be seen. Still, it sparked a fire within me: same font, same graphics--and then Issac told me the unreadable (to me) Chinese part said "American-style..." something he didn't know how to translate but which involved fruit and ice, and so which I instantly put down to SMOOTHIES! Could it be? Could Jamba Juice be opening a store in Kaohsiung?

For those of you who don't know, this is not just your run-of-the-mill smoothie love we're talking about here. Jamba Juice and I have a history. See, I worked there, over breaks, from the end of my senior year of high school till about halfway through my college career. I had a lot of good times at Jamba Juice, in addition to having a lot of good smoothies and, as I learned while researching this post, imprinting the Jamba recipes permanently into my brain. (Peach perfection, anyone? Or how about a Pomegranate paradise?) So a Jamba Juice here in Kaohsiung isn't just another smoothie place: it's HOME, in smoothie-shop form.

Well, the giant "opening" sign finally came down a few days ago, and I spent most of my training session with Issac yesterday obsessing with the shop, forcing myself to work out with the temptation of a smoothie to follow.

So, I finished working out. And I walked over to the shop. Only to discover that it is the single most copy-catty smoothie store I have ever seen! No, it's not Jamba Juice. It's Costa Juice. But let me just give you a quick side-by-side of their brochures:

Look familiar?

Yeah, let's look at this. Color scheme: check. Whirl of colors in logo: check. Banana and other drink-related items colored outside the lines: check. I really had to do a double take, and even asked the girl working there, to see if Costa Juice was actually just a Jamba subsidiary that had changed its name to make it easier to say. (It's not.)

And, lest you think this is just a coincidence, that Costa just happened upon a brochure pattern that looked similar, it's not. I can prove it to you. How, you ask? First of all, this:

Publishing date: Dec. 25, 2003

This is the essence of Jamba, written by the founder and published over eight years ago. Note the artwork. It's exactly the same as everything else at Jamba from a few years ago (I should know, that's when I was working), and it also matches--that's right! Costa Juice.

Reason number 2: in faltering Chinese to match her faltering English, I told the girl working there that, in America, I had worked for a similar company. "Jamba Juice?!" she blurted, in English, before I could get to the name. haHA! Exposed.

But, you know, I'm not going to knock them for it. Walking into Costa Juice made me instantly homesick, as I looked around at the bright colors, the light woodgrain, and, yes, the familiar fonts and graphics. Then I ordered, something called the "Tropical Hawaii," which contained, from what I could gather, pineapple, mango, passion fruit, some sort of sherbet, and more ice than  we would have EVER sanctioned at Jamba. (How do I know this? Because, like at Jamba, they assemble the smoothie behind a glass half-wall. Unfortunately, UNlike Jamba, their blenders had issues and it took easily 10 minutes to get my drink.)

Anyway, I eventually got my smoothie, which was DELICIOUS, and which cost me a grand total of ~$1.75USD. So I'm not complaining. Just pining for the real thing, which I know will be ready for me when I get home. But in the meantime...

COSTA JUICE!