Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Tea is nice.
Tea is important for breakfast.
Tea is often better at Henrik's place.
(Better than other places around here I mean, China/HK itself is a whole different level ... ;-)
I think I've been having tea for breakfast ever since I stopped drinking hot cocoa or Oboy (instant cocoa stuff), there's never been coffee with any regularity. Before the breakfast tea got started the classic thing was evening tea, and dipping crisp bread with cheese in it.
Even though I've been into tea for this long I haven't really been sophisticated about it. It has always been in bag form, and for a long time there was a terrible amount of sugar in it as well :-) ... However, one day I suddenly realized that without sugar tea tasted a lot more the way I always would like it to, and nowadays I often cut out the milk as well.
The end of the teabag era came with meeting Henrik and trying all the interesting tea mixtures he and Karin buys over long games of Mah Jong and others. Drinking tea is now pretty much mandatory whenever Henrik and I meet, the more the merrier (sometimes until Karin thinks it's too much for one night already :-)!
So, nowadays it's real, milk- and sugarless, non-bag tea for breakfast and any other time when I feel a cup or five would be nice.
Sugar really is something you grow away from. I distinctly remember the first time I decided to skip the sugar in my tea to see what it would taste like, and thinking "Oh, this is the way I've always wanted it to taste!". Needless to say I didn't have any withdrawal problems at all :-) ...
I got a whole lot of tea with me back home from Hong Kong, but I was frightfully slow in making use of it. I had a cup or two every now and then, but it wasn't often and the intervals became longer and longer. And when I moved to my own place I left the teas at mom's place and it wasn't until late April 2002 that I remembered them again and brought them over here. And now I'm finally using them, and I think I'm doing something much more right now than I did before because they taste a lot more now. I probably was too restrictive with the amounts of leaves I used for a cup ... So, now I'm appreciating them as they deserve, but it still feels a bit embarassing that Bonnie will come here and find a lot of tea her family gave me last year still not used :-) ...