An Austrian church and village. I like how their roof colors are all
coordinated,


More Spring signs! Farmers are getting out their planting machinery and a whole flock of robins arrived yesterday - kind of offsets the snow we has last night. But only kind of, as today is bone-chilling raw.



Howsomever - isn't that a great word?! Today I am having some Japanese Cherry Sencha Green Tea from the Bamboo Tea House http://www.bambooteahouse.com/ in California. My tea-swap friend, Rene kindly sent it to me. Right away I could tell this is a different flavored tea. It smelled like real cherries and not cherry candy. A tart sweetness is how I would describe it. I brewed it in my nice little green-tea-only Yixing pot for about 2 minutes at about 180 degrees.



The liquor is a very pretty pale golden green and gives off a muted scent of cherry and green tea. Oh, I like the flavor of this. The tea comes through as a nice springy greenness and the cherry does away with what I think of as the fishiness that some senchas have. The tea has a full mouth feel and the cherry lingers on your tongue. A very pleasant experience. I think this would probably make a lovely ice tea, with just a touch of lemon to cut the sweetness for me.



I know some of you are really into Royal memorabilia and if so, you can go to http://bit.ly/eF9sLq to see an article about an English woman who has a huge collection. In keeping with that, the official Will and Kate wedding site is http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/ Neither is really my thing, but we all have different interests. In spite of that I probably will watch at least some of it. A wedding is a wedding, right?



On a different note, The American Tea Room is donating 10% of its on-line sales until March 23 to Japanese relief. Also, if you order $25 worth of tea, they will send you a 2 ounce sampler of their Nirvana Tea, which looked pretty tasty. Their address is www.americantearoom.com