Japan shopping

Just wanted to give an update on my trip to Japan. I did not, unfortunately, have time to go to Uji or Shikuoka. Luckily, good tea was available almost everywhere, and, despite the fact that I don't really speak Japanese, I sat down and sampled green tea at a couple of different stores. I had a particularly good experience at Ippodo in Kyoto, which has an English website

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and ships worldwide. It's a famous old store (what we would call a lao zi hao in Chinese) and was recommended by a friend of a friend who grew up in Kyoto and another tea ceremony devotee in Tokyo, as well as by our hotel. We were initially ignored when we walked in, which as it turned out was due to the fact that only one of the shop workers spoke passable English. I sampled some interesting sencha there, which was so filling that I mistook it for gyokuro, but ended up buying only matcha. The lone English-speaker then gave us a really superb demonstration of how to whisk in the attached teahouse. If you find yourself in Kyoto with an hour to spare, I would say it's the place to go.

I was also impressed that matcha was available in a number of temples, teahouses and public gardens throughout the country, frequently not advertised in English, and served with varying degrees of formality.

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Alex
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