Plot Twist: NANA Drinks Weird Stuff For Your Entertainment (Malaysia Edition)

(For those of you who haven't been following along, this is part of a series on our trip to the EARCOS 2008 Teacher Conference in Kuala Lumpur.)

Kickapoo Joy Juice.



Nana says: like 5-Alive, or a 7-up or Sprite that's less sugar and more citrus. I can concur--so tasty that we took the chance to drink it again a couple days later, just moments before the monkey attack. (Yes, I will keep you in suspense.)

By the way, I've done a little research on Kickapoo Joy Juice, and this stuff gets stranger with every word I read. First, I knew the name sounded familiar: It's a fictional tonic from the Li'l Abner comic strip (the musical version of which I survived in high school). And check out the Kickapoo Joy Juice website: apparently Monarch Beverages started brewing the drink in Atlanta in the 60s, and then it became hugely popular in Malaysia (but NO WHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD) for reasons left completely unexplained. Even wackier: according to this page, the Kickapoo Joy Juice we drank may not even have been the REAL Joy Juice--as a result of a branding dispute between Monarch and a subsidiary in Singapore, the lucrative Malaysian Joy Juice market has been flooded by bootleg Juice in recent years.

I must say, when we bought this stuff at a half-abandoned old train station, in no way did we expect it to be half so darned weird.