Christina / BooksandTea Send Message

Backlog from last night.

This note isn’t going to be so much about this tea as what happened to me before I drank it.

Last night, I finally sent out my swap package to Ost (~hi there, Ost!~). I brought the baggies of tea with me to the post office and then chose a padded envelope for everything.

I’ve been to this post office before, and the person behind the counter is almost always this sweet old woman with grey hair. She looks like she’s a nice person, you know? Competent, knowledgeable, demure – just someone who projects an air of comfort. She doesn’t raise a fit if I don’t know how much the package weighs beforehand, for example.

So, I’m stuffing the bags into the envelope and writing the mailing address on the front, and I’ve got the envelope all sealed up. She’s putting in the destination zip code and measuring the weight to see how much the postage will be, and she asks me if I’m doing something more with tea.

Nine times out of ten, now, if I go to the post office, it’s because it’s got something to do with a tea package. She’s noticed this by now, obviously. So I say “yes” and tell her all about Steepster. The conversation below is heavily paraphrased:

“Oh, I’m part of this site, and we review tea, and we talk about what tea we’re drinking. We share tea, too – so I might try something and then we arrange swaps so other people can try the same teas.”

“That sounds nice!”

“It’s fun! I’m sending out a swap right now, that’s why I’m here.”

“So what did you send out this time?”

“Oh, I sent out a black tea with [flavour redacted, because I want it to be a surprise for Ost], black tea with chestnut flavour, black tea with caramel, some green tea with [flavour redacted so it will be a surprise for Ost].”

Meanwhile, all the while, she sounds so excited, saying things like “that sounds delicious!” and “wow, that’s so neat”. I sense I’ve got a budding tea convert here.

“So what sort of teas do you like?”

And then we spend the next 5 or so minutes talking about different tea flavours, where I buy all these different kinds of tea from, and even fancy/novelty-shaped infusers.

The long story short, ladies and gentlemen, is that the next time I go to the post office, I’m going to give that nice old lady some of the teas in my cupboard to try. Baby steps, though: she likes sweet things and herbals; I’m sure that if I even tried to tell her about pu’erh it would blow her mind.

I’m reminded of a comment that ashmanra made in one of her tasting notes a few weeks ago: “Tea makes friends. Friends make tea.”

Well, it looks like I’ve made a new friend! :-D

By the way, this lemon meringue tea was ok. I just needed something without caffeine, and I also got to break in my new Mr. Tea steeper.