Hi from Bangkok

[john.b]

Greetings! I signed up here a long time back but I guess never posted. I've been writing a blog about tea for a year and a half but it was more to share the discovery process than pass on research. In retrospect it's a little strange I never made it back here, but I'll try to stick around a bit longer this time.

I'll do the standard questions but will mention my blog first, which I guess I could do in the other related thread:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/

How long have you been drinking tea? hard to say, maybe 5 or 6 years. I wasn't really researching it until about 2 years ago.

What was your first Tea?

Aside from tisanes, I remember buying loose tea at a small farm in Laos about 5 or 6 years ago. Looking back it's strange that I was standing beside tea plants growing, buying them from the guy that made it, something I'd see differently now. The tea was ok but I didn't get really hooked until later. The coffee they grew and served me there nearly gave me a heart attack and/or anxiety attack; funny how really fresh coffee and caffeine level works out.

What is your favorite Tea currently? dahongpao!

What is your next purchase?

I've bought so much tea in the last two months my wife would kill me if I bought anything soon. I just bought longjing, bai mu dan, a dark oolong from Thailand, and dahongpao, and the vendor (someone I know) threw in versions of Golden Needle and Oriental Beauty, all this not long after buying a decent amount of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese teas on a trip.

Where is your favorite spot to brew up? nothing special, home and work; I have two young kids so it's not like I'd go out in the garden for an hour


One cool part about living in Asia is lots of places are local travel (kind of relative, I mean like seeing other states back in the US), so we've been to Japan and Korea in February, and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore in the last year (overkill, really). Obviously I'd love to see more of China but I've only been to Hong Kong (a different thing) and cities there, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen (for work, that last, that trip got me hooked on tea).

I've been writing more about travel as well in my blog (and combining that with tea research, more about going to Korea) but that idea took a long time to set in, so the writing is all over the map. But I'll try to talk more here about whatever is in the threads.

[jayinhk]

Welcome to Teachat! You're not the only member in Thailand... I know of at least two others. I'm in HK myself. How'd you get hooked on tea in Shenzhen?

[john.b]

I was on a business trip there and the company (Huawei) had a tea station set up to do an intro to Chinese tea service, and while I was waiting on others to buy things in a local market I hung out in a loose tea shop.

The odd thing is that I still had no idea what I had been drinking, or what was in that shop, even though I had been drinking tea for awhile, and that was the second time that trip I tried a few different teas. It didn't hit me as a revelation that the tea was unlike anything I'd tried but it started a process that essentially led there later.

[Rui]

Hi John,

Welcome to the forum. Great to see you are here now as well.

[john.b]

Thanks. I hope it works to talk a bit here; sometimes even interesting discussion sites get a bit quiet and it's hard to keep up.

People here in "real life" are nice about humoring me talking about tea all the time--most of them--but after awhile they probably think it's a bit strange. It's nice to write a blog so I can just talk to myself instead for awhile if I feel like it.

[john.b]

I finally visited the tea shop everyone talks about here, Double Dogs tea room in Chinatown. It was ok, nothing too unusual, just decent tea. I guess per most people's standards that would be "good tea," but relatively good tea doesn't seem so unusual to me (a decent Wuyi Yancha, for example).

I'll write it up in a blog post, since I do write one, but I've not heard back from here those are of interest (just more of someone talking about a tea, they do kind of get repetitive). If anyone on here wanted to talk more about tea in Thailand I'd be up for that, related to hearing or passing on suggestions, etc. I've also recently started a discussion on a local expat forum about tea (not the first time I've done that), but most of what I'm hearing is that expats here drink tea made from tea bags, so there's more discussion about what loose tea basically is than anything else.

[Rui]

On my side I am looking forward to read about Thai teas on your blog. As you know I have no experience on those teas and I would love to hear about them.

If you have not done so you might want to add your blog's details to the "TeaBlogs and Vlogs" section to make the TeaChat members more aware of it.

[john.b]

Thanks! If anything I'm saying too much on this forum already, with posts all over the place about different things. I did just write one more blog post about another Thai tea, the main one found here, Jin Xuan oolong:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co ... -thai.html

The post before that was on a subject of interest to me, objectivity and subjectivity related to tasting tea, but I didn't mention it here to avoid overdoing it (but I will here):

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co ... n-tea.html