Crushed Strawberry Drink is another crushed-fruit drink from Korea. It smells like one of my favorite candies of all time - the hard candy with liquid filling where the wrapper is designed to look like a strawberry. I'm sure at least some readers know what candy I'm talking about.

The juice itself doesn't taste as good as it smells though - it's a really sweet, flat strawberry flavor. My first instinct was right, and it does taste like the liquid inside of that strawberry candy. The thing that makes this a weird drink though is that it has little chunks of strawberry floating around in it. Most people are used to orange juice having pulp, but not strawberry pulp.

Actually, how many of you have even drank strawberry juice at all? I've seen it blended into smoothies, but I never thought of it as a good juicin' fruit. The strawberry pulp is less like crushed strawberry than strawberry shreds. You can feel them when you drink it, but only if you're paying attention. We're not talking chewable strawberry chunks here people.

To be honest, I didn't have high expectations for this Korean crushed strawberry drink when I picked it up in a store in China. It lived up to my expectations exactly. It comes in a small can like a lot of Korean soft drinks, and it's the perfect size.  It's good for a tasting of an interesting flavor, but it's not particularly refreshing and I probably wouldn't want to drink a lot of it.

When I was a kid growing up I hated asparagus. We had it growing in our garden and my mom would make it steamed about once a week and force everyone to eat it. It wasn't until I started to like dipping it in horseradish that it became edible. While it's ok in limited portions these days, asparagus will not show up on my plate unless it's  a free side at a restaurant that I don't know about.

So, I don't know that they were thinking when they decided to squeeze the juice out of (what seems like) a very un-juicy vegetable to make asparagus juice. But it's China, the land of peanut juice and corn juice, not to mention Jew's ear juice, so what can I say?

The asparagus juice (芦笋汁 lu2 sun3 zhi1) came in a juicebox probably to deliberately obscure the sight of what I thought was going to be a nasty green liquid. It turned out completely unexpectedly that it's clear juice.

And actually it doesn't taste that bad!

It strangely reminds me of Capri Sun and honeysuckle juice, finished off with asparagus. It doesn't even have a bad aftertaste like normal asparagus does. It's kindof refreshing, but not really. The thing is, which I found out after reading the label, it's mostly sugar water, with only 10% real asparagus juice. If you drink it quickly, you can't even taste the asparagus at all.

After doing some research as I usually do out of curiosity, I think this juice is made (at least partially) with Black Galingale or Galangal, a.k.a. blue ginger, a root in the ginger family that is used often in traditional asian medicines. I am able to recognize the first two characters on the label as Kha, meaning galanggal, but my Thai is not so good to be able to recognize the rest. If you can read Thai, please help me out and leave a full translation in the comments. Also, if you've tried this juice I'd like to know what you think.

This is a really good drink from Korea. It tastes sweet just like fruit punch should taste. The flavor reminds me of drinking Juicy Juice when I was a kid, and just like that delicious children's beverage, I have no clue what kind of fruits or berries actually went into making Pok Pun Ja. The only downside is that it comes in a really small bottle, like a lot of other Korean drinks.

It did, however, beat out the longan juice in a side-by-side taste test. I couldn't help comparing since I ordered them both at the same time. I even got a second opinion who agreed that the roselle juice was the better pick out of the two.

Roselle is a type of hibiscus flower, which is used often for making teas and is made into a drink in many other countries as well, including Mexico where it is called "agua de Flor de Jamaica"

This grape drink from Korea is weird and good at the same time. Out of all the Korean drinks I tried, this was one of my favorites. It is just like grape juice, but with little chunks of grape at the bottom. You have to drink it with a straw so the chunks of grape get sucked up, then you can chew on them. The texture is like if you peel a grape and soak it in juice for a little while, because that's pretty much exactly whats going on here.

Some people might think it's a little bit slimy, but I think it's delicious.

On my trip to Hong Kong, I picked up another weird drink that I had never seen before in a 7-11. Beside the fact that I didn't recognize the name 夏枯草, I could tell it was weird because of the drink's tagline: "Common selfheal fruit-spike drink."  That doesn't give me any clue as to what's in it.

It tastes basically like raisin juice, but really a mild flavor. It's not sour or bitter at all, and not even too sweet. It just has a little raisin-y aftertaste, and is pretty refreshing cold. I think you could also drink it hot, like the jew's ear juice, and it might taste good that way too.

Checking my trusty Chinese translator, nciku.com, it seems I've never heard of this fruit before either. It's xia1 ku1 cao3 in Mandarin, ha6 fu1 chou2 in Cantonese, Prunella vulgaris in Latin, and "Self-heal" in English. Also known as Lance Selfheal in the US, it's a flowery plant that's harvested for it's medicinal properties. It supposedly can help to heal a whole bunch of diseases, and is being researched for cancer, AIDS, and diabetes treatments.

Getting to the label, here are the ingredients: purified water, cane sugar, common selfheal fruit-spike, dates, grosvenor momordica fruit, and liquorice root. If you're wondering what the second-to-last ingredient is, it's luo han guo, which is probably why this tastes a little similar to the luo han guo juice I tried in Thailand.

The xia ku cao juice has no preservatives or artificial colorings, and based on the ingredients it sounds like it's really good for you. It tastes good too.

I'm noticing a trend about this juice stand, is that they all seem to be healthy juices. Asiatic pennywort is also eaten raw as a salad, and it said to help maintain youthfulness.

Other common names for this plant are - brace yourself - gotu kola, indian pennywort, luei gong gen, takip-hokol, antanan, pegagan, pegaga, vallaarai, kula kud, bai bua bok, brahmi, rau ma, manimuni, ondelaga, and the saraswathi plant. Well I'm guessing this plant, whatever you want to call it, grows all throughout south and southeast Asia because every language in the area had to have their own name for it.

Actually, out of all of those, the one in my own language sounds the least appealing. I would much rather drink vallaarai juice or ondelaga juice than pennywort juice any day.

According to Wikipedia, other names for this weird fruit are arhat fruit, monk's fruit, la han qua, and even a longevity fruit. It's used in Chinese medicine, mainly as a sweetener and is even used to create a sugar substitute because it is so sweet. But is also said to help with some illnesses such as heat stroke, larynx infection, cough, and diabetes. I can't vouch for any of these "cures," all I can say is that the juice does taste pretty good.

This Thai drink is sweet like a plum or a date, and reminds me of the flavor of sno-cones when I was a kid. It's an artificial flavor, so of course it's not dead on to what the fruit tastes like, but I can see how you could imagine that it tastes like longan.

While I'm a little disappointed at the flavor, it's not bad for artificial fruit juice.