Australia
I've had this whole last week off work, and had writing blog posts as one of the things I wanted to do with my time. Now it's Sunday morning, and here I am with no blog posts written. So goes life. This week off was actually due to COVID, and it was a staycation because of COVID. I work for a hospital, and since there has been a massive budgetary loss due to COVID thanks to a temporary shutdown of elective surgeries, people staying away from the ER and doctor offices in general out of fear of being around sick people, and the fact that the rumored huge payouts by insurance companies for a COVID diagnosis are pure fiction, people working at my pay grade have to take a week off of work without pay, or give back 50 hours of vacation time. The people in the pay grade above me have to double that - 2 weeks off without pay or 100 hours of vacation given back. I actually had a friend post on social media that her uncle died from COVID hours after she had to listen to some whacko ramble on and on about the conspiracy theories about COVID, and how much money hospitals were making off of it. I added a comment about my forced unpaid week off due to financial losses from COVID. A lot of the small hospitals in my state took out Medicare loans, and are now freaking out about how they are going to pay them back. The people who argue that we should just build the infrastructure to deal with this virus, and live our lives as normal have no concept of what that would really take. It's still kind of strange to think that a pandemic, something that would arguably increase the demand for healthcare is seemingly the thing that would break it financially.
Enough about the current state of things, I have some drinking to do. While most headlines about pandemic drinking are about alcohol, I am my usual weird self, and drink tea instead. Today we are exploring on of the smallest continents, yet one of the largest countries in the world. Australia. The capital is Canberra, which is situated between the better known cities of Melbourne and Sidney in the southeast corner of the country. To look at a map, that is where most of the cities are clustered. Australia was the last inhabited continent to be explored by Europeans, although as usual, aboriginal populations lived there long before the Europeans arrived. As usual, the aboriginal population had been modifying the land and establishing settlements that were completely dismissed by the Europeans.
Large swaths of arid land are still considered bush. Inhabitants outside of the cities are still quite isolated, while modern Australian society draws from many cultures, in fact the population comes from over 270 different ethnic groups. Much of this cultural diversity came from immigration in the mid 20th century. In the 1990s, this multiculturalism drew out a conservative backlash. That last part sounds so familiar...
Most of my knowledge of Australia comes from listening to lectures from healthcare professionals promoting low carb lifestyles (yes, I'm still one of those, and my asthma is doing much better because of it). Part of the focus there is on the aboriginal populations because the Western diet has disproportionally affected them worse than the rest of the population. Oh, colonialism.
Tea also has its roots in colonialism. Most of the videos I found about tea in Australia talked about making British tea (after all, they were a British colony. There was also a lot of talk about using tea bags. I then found a video that talked about new trends in tea drinking in Australia. They are trying out Japanese tea, and brewing methods. Bring on my kyusu style tea pot!
Technically the set should include a spouted vessel to hold the tea after it is brewed, but most of the tea sets on Amazon do not have them. The ones that did have them were really ugly, so I'm using a glass measuring cup in its place. While some advocate pouring the tea directly into the serving cups, the teapot holds enough tea to fill 5 of the cups, and that seems a bit silly.
This teapot is designed for one handed pouring. You wrap your fingers around the handle coming out of the side of the pot, and place the thumb of the same hand on the lid. I had to do a lot of measuring to determine which teapot would be the right size for me. Many online were quite large, and my hand would be too small to pour them correctly. While my teapot does provide some straining mechanism inside the pot, I still use a fine mesh strainer when pouring the contents into my collection vessel.
The tea I chose for this post, is also a Japanese tea. Kaiseki hojicha, which is a roasted green tea. It has a really deep nutty, almost woody flavor. It is a tea that stands up to multiple brewings, and is perfect for this type of teapot. Yay for Australia's exploration and integration of different cultures!
So what have I been up to this past week? Well, a pandemic is the perfect time to work on using up some of the stash from crafty type hobbies, along with doing some house cleaning and decoration.
Back to the grind this week. My office actually moved to a new building while I was out last week. The good news is that since so many people are working from home that a space in a parking lot that costs less than $100 a month opened up, and it's only 2 blocks away! Chances are I will still be contacting night ride to get there when my shift ends (hopefully there is a bus stop there, I haven't been out to the lot to see it yet). Oh I hate the lack of good parking options.
It looks as if you had a good time on your enforced week off! That's good, even if the cause is not so great....
ReplyDeleteMy department is so understaffed that it's hard to get time off. Back to the grind tomorrow.
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