TBT - Throw Back Tea's-day - Japan

Last year, I was lucky enough to get offered a job which sent me to Japan for a weekend. Having never been and always wanted to go, I accepted straightaway, and made sure I got a couple of extra days to do a bit of sight-seeing around Tokyo.

Now, you might be thinking this post will be about going to a tea ceremony, I mean, what's more Japanese than that.

Well, believe it or not, in all my excitement I'd completely forgotten about those...and by the time I got there, I didn't have the time or the budget to go find one.

So that'll be for next time! Hoping there will be one...

But I did get to experience the great culture surrounding tea when going out for meals and being served a complementary cup of tea when sitting down at the table.
I also gave one of their green ice-teas a try...and the flavour was rather unexpected to my western, over-sweetened taste-buds - it was so bitter!

So here are few tea-related pictures of my adventure on the other side of the world, my first ever Asian experience.

The hotel I stayed at for work did have a room kettle, and it was one of the sweetest I've ever seen.

The tea that they served in the media centre at Fuji was also very good and very welcoming. Took a couple of packets home with me, but I think I've drunk them all now. 

The hotel I stayed in was next to a theme park, with a 'French' area, that kind of looked like a miniature Paris. I naturally stopped for a cuppa there, and bought something sticky to snack on, as I had a long bus ride back to Tokyo ahead of me. 

Back in Tokyo, on my first day, I got a tour around Akihabara, the geeky part of the city, and got taken to a 'maid café'. That was one of the more surreal experiences of my life, and the only picture I could take while I was there (you had to pay to get one with the girls...) was of my drink. A rather bitter and cool cup of tea, in a nice heart shaped mug. I was also bitter, because the tour was rather disappointing (just being taken around shops...) and then we had to pay to get into the maid café, and order a drink, which were all quite expensive, as it was the experience we were paying for.

And I was British and embarrassed...

But moving on. I've gone through my files, and unfortunately, I don't seem to have taken any pictures of the little bowls of tea you get with your meal (I'm not one to normally take pictures of my food...) but I did take a picture of a cuppa I got in a mall not too far from my hotel in Shinjuku. 

Why I took the picture? No idea. It was decent, "English" tea. I was just glad to have somewhere to sit and relax for a bit. The culture was getting to me a bit by then. I was loving it, but all that Japanese everywhere, all this culture that was so foreign to me, it was just getting to me a bit by then, and I was looking forward to my flight home later that day. 

So here's to hopefully getting the chance to visit Japan again in November, and this time, going for a real tea experience!