Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Sencha: Japanese Tea Ceremony

 This semester I took a Japanese tea ceremony class. It was pretty interesting and we drank tea, eat sweets and explored Japanese tea culture. We learned about Senchadou, which is different from the well known Chadou. It uses different utensils, different tea leaves (sencha(煎茶・せんちゃ), not the usual matcha(抹茶・まったちゃ)) and the tea serving and brewing methods are different. For more information visit the following link ---> Sencha
This is the arrangement of the table.
 This is used to pour in the water, when you are cleaning the cups.
 Brewing tea in the cute little chahou (茶宝・ちゃほう)

 This is called chatsubo (茶壷・ちゃつぼ)and is used to keep the tea leaves in. The bamboo tool is called sokushi (則子・そくし)and is used to pour the tea leaves in the chahou.
Senchadou uses very small teacups, which are called chawan (茶碗・ちゃわん)



Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Gion, Kyoto's biggest festival

Warning: These pictures aren't very good. There was a really big crowd and we had to walk all the time and keep up with it, so I just randomly took pictures of what I could. Please, enjoy :)