I’m skipping the queue with this one because this is a really old bag that Fleurdelily shared with me in 2012. Yes, 2012. It’s that old! It’s been languishing in a tin of quite forgotten teabags of the same age and that’s what I’ve been drinking today.
This is the one that has handled it the worst. There’s pretty much nothing left, but there’s just enough flavour to provide a fairly pleasant cup of hot water.
On the other hand, it gives me an opportunity to impart a green tea related thing that happened to me yesterday. At work we have this coffee/hot chocolate vending machine that we can use for free. It can also dispense hot water so they’ve put up a selection of usually around five to seven different boxes of tea bags. Several of these boxes seem to be variety packs so the amount of choice is quite good. Only… Primarily, it’s Pickwick, and Pickwick is on par with Lipton. Well, it’s free and it’s a super common brand and most people aren’t as into this stuff as we are on Steepster. (No, really. Most people don’t care. It’s true!) It’s our cleaning assistants who look after it, and yesterday one of them was doing the daily cleaning/re-fill of it. She had just taken the foil off a green tea variety pack when I happened to walk past. So she thrust it right under my nose.
“Here, smell this! Doesn’t that smell lovely?” says she.
(recoils a bit) “I think it smells cheap…” says I. I swear it just popped out of my mouth. Had I had a moment to think I’d have just said yes and judged silently.
“Cheap?! You’re not serious! They cost over 20 kr each these boxes!” exclaims she.
“Yeah, that’s cheap,” says I in another spontaneous moment and hurried on before we could get into a discussion about it.
What I really ought to have said was that it smelled ridiculously expensive, because while the tea itself did smell quite cheap and paper-y, she’s right that it is hugely expensive when it comes to the actual amount of actual tea in a box.
I will also blame my unintended honesty on the fact that the box she put under my nose was a variety pack of floral scented green teas, and I don’t much care for floral stuff under the best of circumstances. Actually I don’t even much like the smell of perfume or even some flowers. There’s a particular one that I’ve told Husband in banned from the house on account of it being stinky. I can’t remember what it’s called, but I can recognise it on sight stink. Luckily for me he thinks he knows which one I mean and is fine with it. For people who like flower smells it’s probably lovely. I think it reeks to high heaven because the scent of it is so very strong.
If only she hadn’t thrust that box under my particular sniffer!
