The beverage world of Tea and Coffee

Ever wonder why brits are so obsessed with tea?
True I've never been there but hey waddaya know, there's telly. A miraculous invention of human kind where people don't need to wander around the globe to see what's out there.
Anyhow, talkin about coffee and tea..

Brits often have this late afternoon tea gathering or ask someone out for tea. On the other side of the world, the americans. Don't know whether they're the one who started the obsession with coffee, but hey.. that's where starbucks first established. They (as in americans) use coffee for socializing purpose. Since that bloody country is of course the dominating country across the globe, hence other countries suddenly have the tendecy to consume coffee and eventually got addicted to it. Consider Australia, this country accounts as one of the world's largest coffee consumptions. Everywhere you look around, there will always be a cozy and sometimes unique coffeehouses in every block of the city. First thing people seek when they wake up, is certainly.. coffee. They got so addicted, they wouldn't be energized whenever coffee isn't injected into their blood every single morning. But haven't done any research on this. So no data to back-up these views. Will update later if the data can be found somewhere.

Now,speaking of its' rival... some asian countries are more likely to drink tea than coffee. Well you know, in the old days. Since Americans have invaded our culture for these past several years, which caused today's generation to consume coffee more than tea. Maybe during our granny/grandad's era, they tend to drank tea cos of the invasion of brits to asian countries? Don't remember much about world history, more so about indonesian history. =P Just consider this, when you go to chinese restaurants, first beverage they serve you is always tea (jasmine/chinesse/green tea), not coffee. Also indonesians, they tend to drink tea than coffee for some ages ago. Now, things changed. The trend thesedays switched to coffee consumptions, of course after the rapid establishment of starbucks (what else!) in every corner of big cities. Nevertheless. tea is still perceived as a more "healthy" hot drink rather than coffee. At least that's what mum asked me to drink whenever I got a lil bit ill. Of course aside from water, tea is sometimes our first preference of beverage. Don't think of hot tea, but let say cold drinks such as Teh botol, tekita, and perhaps those jasmine tea (yea or sumtin brand). They're still our most wanted beverage compared to coffee, right? Doesn't that tell you something?

What makes me wonder is that, why do brits (or in general, europeans?) at the beginning have those "high tea" -slash- afternoon tea gathering or a more classy term is "tea party" for socializing purpose. I guess, tea is considered more classy, more sophisticated, maybe higher status than coffee. Considering, there is no such thing as coffee party or afternoon coffee meal (well, maybe there is?) and there is no room called "coffee room" but there are those called "tea room", right?

So Coffee or Tea anyone?