Welcome
Here I document my adventures in travel, lifestyle, and thinking differently with the hope of broadening people’s perspectives. I hope you enjoy!
Here I document my adventures in travel, lifestyle, and thinking differently with the hope of broadening people’s perspectives. I hope you enjoy!
Although I had tea growing up, my first formative experience with tea was on a train from Moscow to Izhevsk in Russia. We were in a small group on our way to do anthropological research in Udmurtia when a babushka offered to share some of her tea with us. We didn’t speak Russian and our translators were in another car, but she nevertheless persisted. Even without speaking the language, it was immediately clear how tea could bring people together and lift everyone’s spirits. Despite having caffeine, it can also be an incredibly calming and centering beverage, such as when Zen monks use it as an aid for their meditation practice.
Ippodo Tea: I buy all my Japanese tea here.
They have a nice format ranking teas by strength so that you can decide which one is best for you. Generally, I would avoid the least strong teas as they are designed for baking.
They also have both a US site, a Global site, and a Japanese site. The tea is more or less the same across each site but they sometimes have different utensils, books, recipes on the three sites.
Zhao Zhou: A fantastic tea shop in Budapest and my favorite in Europe. They sell a wide variety of teas online which are all of great quality.
This shop sits right on the banks of the Danube river and has an incredibly tranquil atmosphere. The staff is very friendly and knowledgable about tea broadly.
MyTeaPal: A unique way to socialize about tea and record personal observations. They also offer a monthly subscription box with some quite unique teas
I worked at MyTeaPal on their efforts to add multiple language support and did some interesting research on which languages have the most tea drinkers. The founder is a good friend and does a fantastic job building a virtual community of tea lovers.
Dobra Tea: A lovely tea shop in Pittsburgh, PA that brings together the wide variety of tea cultures in the world under a single roof. They have some quality teas as well as snacks and welcome you to sit down and stay a while.
Path of Cha: They offer a wide variety of teas at reasonable prices with pretty quick shipping. If there’s a new type of tea I read about and don’t know where to find it, I will often go here with good success. Their quality is rarely bad but some teas they offer can be better than others.
Best of Tokyo List: Good list that introduced me to many of my favorite tea shops in Tokyo. Ippodo, Higashiya Ginza, and Sakurai Japanese Tea Experience are my top three.
