One more day in HK and I am done with my tour, the last 5 days not much about tea but, as that stairwell above says at Narita Airport-Dining, Shopping, Dining, Shopping. And lots of things in between. To be sure, I had travelled to 2 countries, 2 half countries, 16 or so cities, 10-11 tea mountains, tasted around 250+ samples of teas (at least)and knocked down around 9-10 bowls of ramen, in the past 22 days. What I most admire about Japan is its success in preserving as well as advancing, its rich and deep culture from folk art to theater to cuisine, while moving with the speed of bullet trains through the modern world. I heard the first fully communicative and functional companion android has just been birthed there. To be sure, their Abe led government is scary and Tokyo is a concrete jungle, the birthrate is alarmingly low and the population is the oldest living in the world, and the social pressure of being in line and doing the right thing is omnipresent. But your opposite extreme of China, with its hellish government, repression in all fronts except corruption (until recent year), strange illogical financial systems, and every man out to sink or swim out of the polluted cities, without respect for its arts, cultural heritage, nor formal agrarian lifestyle, is not remotely preferable. The only anomaly is tea. There, it is thriving, improving, as if all the yearning of perfection is exercised in this non-threatening cultural icon.
I feel that in being a small part of keeping the tea tradition alive, I am helping China save something precious for humanity for another time.
If not for thinking of that purpose, my work in tea would just fall back into: Dining/drinking, Shopping/buying tea.
