A Tea Addict's Journal

Happy new year to everybody! I hope lots of good tea await you all in 2009.

After a relatively short 21 hours trip from Hong Kong back here (I expected 24), I am breaking out some of my recent acquisitions on this trip. The problem with visiting family, as nice as it is, is that you sometimes end up having no time at all to do the things that you want done while in places like Hong Kong and Korea. Almost all my time, especially meals, was spent with family. There’s nothing wrong with that, except it means no time to hit teashops, or very little, anyway.

I did manage to go to a few places and buy some stuff, and since getting married is a great scam for receiving free tea, I got some tea as well as part of the bargain. Among the stuff I bought

1) 600g of some wet stored pu, in the form of broken bings. Cheap reliable everyday kind of tea…. drinking it right now and enjoying it.
2) 70g of bug shit tea – entertainment value
3) 600g of some aged oolong. Not the highest quality stuff, but it’s stuff that I like, so heck….

Then there’s the requisite free tea of various sorts….
1) four tongs from a very generous friend of my parents’, two are from the late 90s and two of more recent vintage. More on that story later, although I left them in Hong Kong
2) another bing from my friend L in Beijing
3) Two small boxes of some sort of oolong
4) four tins of some British tea

I think that will all tide me over quite well for a while…. until the next trip anyway.