a turtle and a strawberry

Welcome back to the new and improved Lahikmajoe Drinks Tea.

Have had a bit of a break due to my day job, but hopefully that's settling down so I can devote more time to teablogging. After all, that's what really matter, right?

Some have asked me if I'll ever blog again? Well, I suppose this is an answer to that.

Want to see a photo of a turtle and a strawberry?

Really?

What other teablog offers you something like this? None! None, I tell you.

As a matter of fact, this is the first I've ever seen such a photo on a teablog. What does it have to do with tea, you ask?

My answer?

What doesn't it have to do with tea? Strawberry tea. Turtle tea.

My friend Diana, when we were touring in Japan in the early nineties, compared the taste of green tea to turtle pee. After the obvious enquiry as to whether she had personal experience with drinking the urine of the testudo, we agreed that the tea we'd been served by our host actually smelled like turtle urine must taste...to someone who had actually tasted turtle pee, which we hadn't...not us.

What?

Oh, you still want the photo, don't you?

Well, here it is:

The World's Special Tea

How early can one get into tea? And how might one go about it?

I'm sure there's no need to encourage a child. If you're seen drinking tea, eventually the small person is going to ask for a sip of that steaming hot beverage. It's inevitable, right? Earlier this year, I had tea with my niece and wrote about it in:

tea party with Amelia

But I stand by my initial thought on this. I have no qualms about a child having a sip of my tea but if a child isn't accustomed to tea, I'd start with an herbal blend. It just seems like the more natural introduction. 


Still, I wondered then what I'd say if she wanted to know about the history of tea. How did people start drinking tea? for example. Or Why does your tea have such funny names?


So imagine my surprise when Jo Johnson asked if I'd like to see a book she'd written that specifically introduced tea to children. I enjoy tea samples and receive my share of them, but I think my writing about tea books has (correctly) led people to believe I'm as interested in tea writing. In case it wasn't completely clear, I'll say right now: I love tea books. They're good for the teablog, they encourage conversation about tea, and finally they're books. One of my weaknesses.


The book is called The World's Special Tea, and it's exactly what I'd want to have had in order to introduce Amelia to tea. It tells the history of tea from it's earliest Chinese origins through Japan and on to Europe. There's a brief explanation of the Boston Tea Party, as well as the English replanting of Chinese tea seeds in India. 


The book tells about the Camellia sinensis plant, from which all tea is made, and even mentions herbal or Tisane without getting mired in a discussion about what is and isn't tea. I like that. I've mentioned it here before: although I understand the hard-line position that we should only refer to tea as that which comes from the tea plant, I find it's often pedantic and nit-picky. With an adult, I might get into a discussion about this topic, but with a child? A Tisane is tea.

beautiful gift packaging 

And the best part? The book comes with it's own special tea for children (hence the name). Exactly the sort of thing I wanted for Amelia when I served her tea. An herbal blend with a mixture of Rooibus, bits of apple and ginger, as well as orange peels and cinnamon among other things. 


Would I drink this tea? If I were drinking tea with Amelia, I'd drink it happily. Although I rarely think to myself, 'I want some delicious tea,' and then reach for an herbal blend, that's not the point here. Having said all that, I did brew up The World's Special Tea and I could taste many of the flavours that were described in the ingredients. 


Most importantly, this is an inventive answer to my original question: What would I serve a child who was interested in tea? There's a bit in the book about planning a tea party. Not so sure how well I'd manage that one, but I might give it a try. 


The book itself? The World's Special Tea? I can definitely recommend it. Happily.

tippling at the Japanese Teahouse

Finally did something today which I'd been planning for months. See, the Japanese Teahouse in the Englischer Garten in the heart of Munich has very limited opening hours. It's not a teashop actually, so I guess it's not so odd. Nevertheless, they're only open on the second weekend of each month (and I'm doubtful that they open through the winter).

I kept intending to go, and then promptly forgetting that it was the second weekend of the month till Monday morning. Too late. So each time this happened, I had to wait roughly another four weeks.

Before I go into my impressions, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it in the middle of their article about the Englischer Garten:

Japanese teahouse/Japanisches Teehaus KanShoAn

In April 1972, to celebrate the Summer Olympics of that year, which were held in Munich, a Japanese teahouse and a Japanese garden were created on a small island at the south end of the Englischer Garten, behind the Haus der Kunst. The pond in which the island is set had been created only a few years earlier, in 1969. The teahouse was a gift to Bavaria by Soshitsu Sen, head of the Urasenke tea school in Kyoto. Its designers were Soshitsu Sen and Mitsuo Nomura. A traditional Japanese tea ceremony takes place here regularly.




Here's what it looked like inside. My experiences in Japan were so intriguing. I only wish I'd been more into tea back then.

The overall sparseness and simplicity of everything is appealing to me. It's no accident. It's a crucial aspect of the tea ceremony in general.






The four principles of the tea ceremony are: wa-kei-sei-jaku, or harmony, respect, purity and tranquility respectively.



The tea we were served was a simple Matcha (what else?) and as much as I enjoyed it, I got the impression that some of the others there weren't terribly impressed.

The whole experience was like being magically transported to Japan. Although there was a German introduction and explanation about what we were soon to witness, the actual tea ceremony was entirely in Japanese. It was exotic as well as somehow calming.



As much as I'm a Westerner on the outside looking in at this, I'm undeniably intrigued and would like to know much more about tea ceremony. It's something I thought I'd get around to blogging about much earlier back when I started blogging about tea. Instead I was preoccupied with such important topics such as which tea I might drink with former French leaders like I did in Tea with Charles de Gaulle or even better what tea the infamous drink in Celebrity tea drinkers.

But here I am buckling down and attempting some serious tea blogging topics. Don't worry loyal readers. I'll get back to the frivolous soon enough.

pet peeves and off-the-cuff theories

Recently read an article in the New Yorker about Dick Cavett's new book 'Talk Show' and the talk show wars in the US, and one line in the article got me thinking:

...“Talk Show” (Times Books; $25), a collection of the blogs he writes for the Times. A blog is a means of sharing your pet peeves and off-the-cuff theories of everything with the entire planet. To this point in the history of civilization, that is not what a book is. In a book, normally, one’s eye is on a somewhat farther horizon...


So this blog business is normally about topical things. Right? How can I blog this weekend and not somehow deal with the earthquake/tsunami in Japan? It seems like it's on every channel. Is there really anything new I can say about it.

As I sat down to write this, I'd already considered the many Japanese teas I like. Sometimes I hear people talking about green tea, and some Japanese greens are disparaged for tasting grassy. I understand that, but I like grassy. Although I usually write about black tea on this blog, I definitely enjoy green and Oolong tea.

For some reason I turned to a very simple Japan Sencha Fuji, which I've written about at length in the past.

Here's one a little less than a year ago: analog tea tasting.

And then here's one where I started writing about Japan Sencha Fuji and then somehow found myself riffing on the Ten Virtues of Tea.

My not-so-original thoughts as I sip this delicious Japanese tea and think about what unbelievable circumstances the people made homeless in Japan? Well, it's really hard to look at the footage. My experience with the Japanese people has been fantastic. It's one of the nicest places I've ever been.

Here I am watching an old man on television who's lost his home, and he's crying in front of the camera. I know many cultures are said to be loathe to show their emotions, but this was the most raw thing I'd ever seen displayed by an older Japanese person. I was shocked.

Am I sharing my 'pet peeves and off-the-cuff theories of everything with the entire planet' here? There have been so many examples of how small the world is over the last few days. A friend whose son was snowboarding in Japan flew out of Tokyo's Narita airport just hours before all hell broke loose. A Tokyo tea lover I'm acquainted with on twitter was shaken, but she was assuring everyone who asked that she was unhurt.

As I fall asleep in my very safe home in my very safe city, I hope the people devastated by this event are waking up in a safe, dry place. I want to believe that even if these people are sleeping in community centres or makeshift camps, that someone is providing them with decent tea. It might be one of the few things to bring some sort of comfort in this incomparable time. At least I'd like to hope so.

Floating above the Japanese clouds

If you haven’t noticed already, I’m a bit of an Orientalist. Well, to be more specific, I’m crazy about Japan. Nuts. If I acted on every thought, it’d be an obsession. I think when I was moaning about the winter several weeks ago and daydreaming about going to the Nuwara hills in Sri Lanka, my real thoughts were of going to pre-modern Nippon.

Maybe it’s because I went there when I was young and impressionable. Maybe it’s my fascination with Japanese history and custom. It’s very fashionable to be into China right now. I have absolutely nothing against China. Nothing.

But it just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe if I went there and met the people and saw the tea plantations and drank tea and ate Chinese shish-ka-bob (a la Kevin Rose) out of a rickshaw bar-b-que cooker…maybe then I could become more interested in China.

But as of now, I’m on the way to Japan in my thoughts. I’m above the clouds and flying through the air. It’s not enough to go to modern Japan. In my mind I’m floating back in time as well. To the time when tea ceremony wasn’t yet an institution. If we go back that long ago, this is the thirteenth century and we are Japanese monks.

Our brother monk, Dai-o, has been on a long journey to the Chinese monasteries where he observed and learned about the way the Zen monks in China prepare their tea. It’s so much more than the practical aspect of dunking leaves in heated water. He has shown us that the harmony between the people drinking the tea and the tools or implements that we use to make the tea is very crucial.

There are three things he referenced about the tea ceremony that were true back then and are still true today. Respect, cleanliness and tranquility. There’s no way that I can cover everything about this this in one simple blogpost. Am doing quite a bit of research about tea ceremony and might write an article on the topic soon. Stay tuned. Am enjoying this immensely.

Quick jump from Sino to Nippon

Roughly a week ago, I decided I'd done a passable albeit brief overview of black teas, touched on Oolong (back at the ooutset of this teablog lark), and had ignored green long enough.

Knowing that the best way for me to talk about specific teas with specific examples, I ordered a selection of different green and white teas, and went back to my daily grind. Didn't exactly forget about the shipment coming my way from Hamburg, but it certainly wasn't in the forefront of my mind.

It arrived and I tore into the parcel like a kid at Christmas. Or Chanukah or Kwansa or insert appropriate winter solstice holiday here. I was überglücklich.

There's an old Buddhist saying that, 'The taste of ch'an (Zen) and the taste of ch'a (tea) are the same.'

So if I plan to ignore China for the time being and go right to Japan, which I do, then I need to talk about tea ceremony and the history of tea's arrival in the Land of the Rising Sun. There's truly nothing I'd rather be doing right now. I'll try to keep it short for those I can already see yawning.

The way the Japanese prepare tea and present it is an aesthetic experience like nothing else I've ever seen. So exquisite is this experience that I wish all of you could just come with me to the tea shops I visited in Tokyo and Hammamatsu and other places. That was back before I had any idea that I was going to become such a tea whacko. I was there for the experience. Today I'd be there to grill the owner about the tea. You can imagine how tea shop owners cringe when they see me coming back to ask more questions.

But the main point I want to make here is that this tea preparation is a corollary to how the Japanese see life and the things that are important. They prepare the tea carefully and specifically, because that's how they view existence. It'd start sounding a bit esoteric if I went on much longer about this, but I needn't go any further. Here's what one of my favourite books said about this:

'...taking tea was said to be an earthly finger that "pointed to the moon" of enlightenment, the awakening to which all Buddhists aspired.'

from The World of Caffeine by Weinberg/Bealer