Global Tea Time

Today we're deviating from our European tour for an aside about my favorite tea growing country. Kenya. Why is it my favorite? As readers of my blog know, it is the only tea growing country I have visited. The story I heard as to why my favorite tea house sells so many Kenyan teas is an interesting one. Apparently a couple went to Kenya to work on some sort of project through their church. When they got there, it was found that there were too many people for that project, and this couple was sent to spend their week at a tea plantation sewing school uniforms. This sounded like the perfect trip to me, I like to sew and drink tea. Anyway, at the end of the week, the couple talked to the plantation owner to see if they could get some samples to take home because they had some friends who ran a high end tea shop. While they told the plantation owner that it may not come to anything, they might be able to get his tea sold in the US. According to the story, the plantation owner was in a ...

There were several countries where the only references I found to tea were "mountain tea", or tea made from local herbs. Further search said they were using the iron wort plant, but I haven't found a local source for that. Thus, I decided to make tea from a plan that grows locally in their honor. I recently made a trip to the local Indian food store to stock up on spices again. I was really excited to find whole turmeric dried. Now I can brew that up with my whole, dried ginger for tea whenever I want instead of searching for fresh turmeric or making sachets of dried herbs out of coffee filters. However, that particular herb is not the focus of today's post. I was intrigued by the bag of dried mint leaves just because I hadn't remembered seeing them before. As you may recall, I had a mint plant a couple of summers ago, so I decided to give this mint a try. At the end of the season for my mint plant, I tried drying the leaves for later use, but they...

I wasn't sure that I would have a post about Austria . Austria is a landlocked country in the middle of Europe. It's an important trade route between eastern and western Europe. Vienna was once the seat of the holy Roman empire, and is known for its architecture, and the Alps run down the middle of the country. 2/3 of the country is covered by forests and meadows. Austria has been known for its musicians, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, the list goes on. Visual arts took their own turn away from the mainstream in 1897, and the realism gave way to modern art and surrealism. YouTube gave me a "Drunk History" style video about making tea. At the end, the tea was shunned in favor of more alcohol. I also found that coffee is popular in Austria. Coffee was described as "the national past time since the Turkish wars". Then Mai Leaf came to the rescue. So, what gets sold in Austrian grocery stores? The video had black and green Darjeeling loose le...

I'm back today. While I did have this post done last Sunday, I was not feeling well, and didn't have the energy to post it. Thankfully I'm feeling better this week, so it's back to life as usual. Today we travel to a landlocked country in central Europe, Hungary . Hungary was much larger prior to WW I. The treaty of Trianon in 1920 took away 71% of their territory. This has caused a long term divide in their population. There are those who still remember and lament this, and those who want to forget about it. Deep political splits sound pretty familiar. Apparently this split still influences a lot of day to day life. Hungary was part of the Soviet Union until the 1990s, and was transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial society during that time. After independence, they had some difficulty lagging behind the world in trade, but were able to catch up and make their own way by the mid 90's. The early 2000's posed some new obstacles, but they are con...