I am Sayama tea, and Sayama tea Cola

We visited a tea shop in Sayama, a place in Saitama. There they sold something called "I am Sayama tea". They also sold something called "Sayama tea Cola". They gave us some very nice tea for free, in cups that were super cute. They were made so that the tea ended up in a cherry blossom shape (this being the cherry blossom season in Saitama, and cherry blossom viewing is a huge thing in Japan).

I bought some Sayama tea Cola to see what that could be. It was a green carbonated liquid that tasted neither like tea nor Cola. It was not very good.

Outside the tea shop they had goldfish or carps swimming around. One of them was much fatter than the others. It looked like it had swallowed a tennis ball or something. They were very quick in their movements, though, so I could not get a good photo.

Tea from my barber

Today I went to get my hair cut. My barber who is over 80 years old gave me some tea leaves too.

Here are two before and after photos too:

Kuk

Our coop now sells tea with Disney characters on the bottles. There are also letters there. When I passed, the bottles that were next in line to be sold spelled out "kuk", which is a bad word in Swedish. I was thinking of buying one bottle just to make the display show a different word, but it is not really a type of tea I like.

Presents from Sweden

My parents sent me some Christmas presents. They arrived when I was not home, but in Japan everything is open 24 hours per day, so I took my bicycle through the snowstorm to the 24h post office that was holding my package and got it around midnight. It turned out to contain licorice (yay!), green tea with licorice (yay!) and dried apples from the family summer house garden. Apparently the apple trees there gave ridiculous amounts of apples (70kg?) this year, so my parents made apple cakes, apple pies, apples as gifts, apple juice, apple jam, and all kinds of things. They also dried some of the apples and sent them to me. They were very good. There was also a cute hedgehog toy animal in the package.

Tea party

The things that went into the Taiwanese tea

Today I got up unbelievably early (8:30, which is early considering I usually work until 5 a.m. on Saturdays) and went to a tea party with a magician friend. This turned out to be quite nice.

Grinding the tea

We got to try some rare to find teas, and we got lots of cookies and things too. It was also interesting to learn how to use all the myriads of tools that apparently go into drinking tea properly.

Grinding tea and peanuts

I was told that they have this type of event once per month, and every time they try out different teas. Today we got to try a Taiwanese green tea and a Chinese brown tea.

The final result

First we got a small mortar and started by grinding the tea. Then we added peanuts and sesame seeds and something else and ground this up too. Then we added sweet beans and some other nut and kept grinding. Finally, some sweetened milk was added, and the paste was read to be added to boiling water. After mixing it up in water, we also added some crouton-like things. The result was more like soup than tea, but it was very good.

The tools to make and enjoy Chinese tea

We also got freeze dried mushrooms, which were kind of like cookies. There was also dried fruits, Moomin shaped cookies, and Finnish chocolate available.

Roll cake

Next, we were taught how to properly heat up cups and other things with hot water before using hour glasses to time things for the Chinese tea. There was one cup for drinking the tea, and another cup for experiencing the smell of the tea.

A Moomin cookie on a baumkuchen 

Things like coconut roll cake and other fairly heavy foods showed up too. Much more food than I normally have at 10 in the morning, but very nice.

The cafe were the event took place had lots of interestingly designed things, like this bottle opener

Milk tea: off mode

Our coop has a new product called "Milk tea off mode". This probably refers to the "Calorie off" (low Calorie) part, but still sounds a bit strange.

Tea with a taste of pine

In Sweden you can find tea that actually tastes of (and is made using) pine. In Japan, you can find tea that is named as if it tasted of pine, but this is actually the Japanese word for pineapple (which is the English word, shortened down to the more normal length of words in Japanese by just throwing away the last part, even though this makes it into a different English word :-) ).

Licorice green tea

When I was in Sweden in May, I visited a licorice and salmiakki specialty store. They had green tea with licorice. In Japan everyone likes green tea (you often get green tea at restaurants instead of water) but almost everyone hates licorice.

I bought a bag of this tea and recently started drinking it. It is actually very good! Even the packaging is clever and it comes with a clever system for keeping the rest of the tea dry.