San Francisco Trip Report

Well, as I said I was traveling with my wife and 2 year old son. I wasn't able to spend a lot of time in Chinatown. By the time we got there it had already been a really long day. We had late lunch, early dinner at a restaurant on Sacramento St. I found a couple of markets with the standard Chinese commercial brands like FooJoy. Those are easy to find around here, so I moved on. We walked on Washington between Sacramento and Grant streets and I found a couple of herb/tea shops. They mostly had strange dried things. I then found a shop with a wall of various teas. There in the middle were the Yunnan Tuocha's that I had been buying from Imperial Tea Court

7&Category_ID# . They were $1.50 instead of $5. They seem much older than what I've been getting from ITC. They have more of a "clean horse barn" smell and are smoother. The paper inside the boxes I bought have 1992 stamped on them. I don't know if this is the year they were made or not. My big mistake is that I only bought 4. I was trying to hurry and not be too selfish with my families time and vacation money. I drink one of these tuocha's every month or so. I could have bought a two year supply for under $40. And no, I don't remember the name of the shop. It wasn't until we were sitting in my hotel room in Monterey that I realized my mistake. I've been doing some internet searching to see if I can come up with a name and number for the shop. The shopkeeper spoke fairly good English and I might as well see if they would be willing to ship more to me.

I also got some Shifeng Brand Lung Ching in a nice tin with a tight fitting inner lid. It's not the best Lung Ching I've had, but it is a very nice tea.

I also stepped into Yau Hing Company on Grant St.. It looked like they had a nice selection and were knowledgeable about their teas. I didn't buy anything as they were busy and I didn't have time to sit down and have them brew up some teas to sample.

Blues