Tea Time

For the vast, vast majority of my life tea has been an enigma to me.  Just didn't like it.  Hot-Iced made not difference.  Later on in life I got to like Asian tea varieties with my Asian meals.  So I would have green tea with Japanese, and jasmine tea with Chinese and Vietnamese.  I do like chai - real Indian chai - not the glob they serve in most coffee places.  But for the most part, having a cup of tea?  No thank you.  Give me my coffee.

But this fall when I was so sick, and my integrative physician was giving me a homeopathic remedy, one of the things you had to not consume was coffee.  Horrors!  So I was forced to move to tea for my daily caffeine.  I never did get used to having tea in the morning (though making my own chai was a very acceptable substitute).  However, I found that later in the day that I was enjoying that cup of tea more and more.

Simultaneously, I was frequenting a Tea shop here in ABQ because it is much quieter than the Starbucks just five doors down (and coincidentally their coffee is better).  They have an extensive selection of black and green teas.  I started to try more of them and ask questions.  "So what is the difference between Scottish Breakfast and English Breakfast tea other than one is a few hundred miles further north?"  "Is Yorkshire Gold a real tea or some kind of marijuana?"  Questions like that.  You can see that I immediately endeared myself to them.

So now my cup of tea is becoming a daily ritual anytime that I'm home.  I've bought supplies of loose tea leaves and I'm experimenting with different ways of brewing them to come up with my own favorite. And really loving it.