tea

how appropriate! BBC4 is currently airing In Our Time and chatting about the historical development of tea in Britain and how it became a national identity (or more appropriately a daily drug) here.... the 'anglo-saxon domestication' of a Chinese tradition with the 'fusional' ceremony of adding milk and sugar; as well as an obsession that unwittingly led to the inception of the Opium War..... a cuppa tea is indeed a British thing... yet a rather amusing irony about this enthusiasm is that while the Brits may very well drink more tea than anyone in Europe, they have fewer selection of teas in their tea houses (if you find one; they are not very common here, surprisingly) or the supermarkets compared to her European compatriots, the Germans. there are many more quaint little tea-shops where you can get a plethora of all sorts of flavoured teas in Germany....

i have fond memories of visiting Mokka (shown in picture), a little shop in the old part of T?bingen which sells lovely assortments of chocolates, pralines, truffles, aromatic coffees, and most importantly? their own mix of flavoured teas in all different tea varieties (redbush, green, black, sencha, etc?.). tea appears to be sold through tea-merchants here?.i have found it hard not have a good local tea-shop to frequent?for i am quite a tea-addict, if you haven't already realise...even though there is Whittard, they do not really have a broad selection of teas.... and they do not sell tea filter-bags! a must for loose teas! feeling slightly desperate about the tea-situation, i started Goooogling? and found Grey?s Teas and E-teas; the latter has quite a large variety of teas (including tea-filter bags) but even then, E-teas does not appear to stock Lavender tea? nor Blueberry Redbush tea?. both of which are a few of the things i treasure.