More Pictures! Pt. 3 (Tea)

Tea is a big deal, not only in Kyoto but all over Japan. There seem to be a lot more coffee cafes around Kyoto, but I get the impression that tea is more of the daily regular drink, and coffee is the treat to go out and get, which is why it's usually $3-$5 a cup. Either way, everytime I have bought tea there have been great directions on how to prepare it. A famous tea company even has some directions in English! These are directions for sencha, one of the more common kinds of green tea, the kind you probably drink at a Japanese restaurant in the US.

A bag of cheap tea even comes with wonderful directions! This was a $2 bag of 52 packets of Oolong Tea.

For those of you that don't know, Kyoto is the heart of Japanese Tea Ceremony, so there are also many shops around the city selling tools and goods for tea ceremony, as well as tea ceremony snacks and matcha flavored anything. If there's something that matcha can be used for, it seems to happen pretty easily. There's a store that sells very thin papers that you use to blot off the oil from your face, and they even have matcha flavored ones, even though I don't think you're supposed to eat them.