Wouldn't you know it that as soon as I finally got around to announcing that I was taking a break, I'd be ready to start posting again?
Time for Tea
Until recently, I was a dedicated coffee drinker. Not that I drank so much coffee (by American standards), but I was very consistant: one cup in the morning, and another (usually a latte) in the late afternoon. I limited my tea drinking to when I was sick (when I'd have herbal), or on my visits to my most favorite place in New York, Alice's Tea Cup. Now, I really thought hard about whether I'd even mention Alice's on this blog, because I fear that if too many people find out about it, it will get too popular and I won't be able to get a table without a long wait on my future visits to NYC. Even now, it's usually a pretty long wait on weekends. So don't tell anyone, k? Let's just keep this gem between us.
Alice's has a fabulous selection of teas of all sorts, and you can buy the loose tea by the ounce to make yourself at home. (They also have the most amazing scones, so amazing that the scones probably deserve their own post.) My friends know how much I love Alice's tea, so Noah and Amanda bought me as a housewarming gift two lovely chrome-colored canisters of tea. They did a great job picking them out, too: one is Symphony, a black tea flavored with strawberry and chocolate (there are even chocolate chips mixed in with the loose tea!) and the other is Alice's Tea, which has roses in it and other interesting flavors. Now, they didn't know it when they chose them, but Symphony was the first tea I ever tried at Alice's (because as a non-tea drinker, chocolate & strawberry tea sounded pretty yummy, and indeed it is), and Alice's Tea became a favorite in my last couple visits to the shop before I moved. And the fancy canisters are really cool.
A few weeks after Noah & Amanda bestowed this lovely gift upon me, my friend Sara visited. Sara was the one who introduced me to Alice's, so I of course offered her some tea while she was here. I mentioned to her that next time I visited New York I wanted to pick up another canister for my Passion Fruit tea from Alice's (which had been living in a lowly sack). Lo and behold, a few days after she went back to New York, a package arrived for me containing a canister of that tea.
And then a couple weeks later, my friend Amy was visiting me and brought me some ginger tea as a housewarming gift! We already had quite a lot of tea in the house, but now my pantry is tea central.
But you know what? Suddenly I'm drinking tea every day! I'm even thinking of knitting myself a felted tea cozy. I always thought tea cozies were absolutely ridiculous, but now that I make myself pots of tea, I'm realizing that I really do need something to keep it warm. And I'm thinking I need a bigger teapot, too, because over Labor Day weekend I had seven guests in the house and most of them were tea drinkers. And some cups and saucers, instead of my usual coffee mugs. Who knows? Maybe I'll host a tea party sometime.
I'm still drinking coffee, too, of course. But I haven't had a latte in weeks.
