Moving on to LOTS of One Type of Tea and SALT

So just kidding about going to Boston, apparently. Which is fine by me, because now I get to do all the things I originally wanted to do in the Pacific Northwest this summer! Yes, there is disappointment, but cest la vie. Time to drink some tea!

This summer I've been doing something rather strange (for my behavior). Instead of having a few different kinds of tea in a day, or in a week for that matter, I've just been blowing through one tea at a time. First it was some greens, then I moved on to some open oolongs, and now a puerh while I decide which tea to unseal next. Probably going to be a Taiwanese oolong. I'll drink a little of one thing or another in between the big stuff, I have a lot of samples I need to go through (I burnt my tongue on some stupid coffee the other day and had a crazy bought of seasonal allergies preventing me from being at my tasting best haha), but for the most part its just been a lot of multiple gaiwans or pots one right after another. This has allowed me to make some interesting personal observations.

• Green teas make me very happy, awake, and relaxed. They also significantly reduce my appetite, but if I drink too much then I have experienced a lot of symptoms of very low blood sugar. Of course it was fine when I made sure to eat better when drinking as much as I was. Its impressive how significant the blood-sugar lowing effects of green tea were, though. 
• For oolongs, especially dark Wuyi cliff ones, I really don't recall noticing anything too significant. I don't really think I drank enough in a short enough period of time. I was busier when I was going through my tin of Shui Xiang in particular. I'll try this out with a light Taiwanese oolong when I feel like it later this week or next. (I'm out of darker oolongs)
• I love puerhs. Could you tell from my previous blog posts? Haha. Puerh makes me very, very, very relaxed. I also get extremely focused and creative when I've drunk enough. I wrote over 3000 words of a short horror (I love a good horror/thriller) story last night during which I went through about 3 gaiwans worth of puerh. I like drinking puerh at night because it can also help me sleep (or at least doesn't interfere with me needing/wanting to sleep). Note again that these are all preliminary personal experiences with no control for other food intake... 
• I have not drank copious amounts of either white, black, or sheng puerhs like this as of yet. 

I'll probably keep doing this until I feel like switching it up all the time again. So hopefully more observations will emerge!

One of the other things I've been working on testing out finally is SALTING the water that I use to make my tea. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'll explain where I got the idea here again anyways. I'm fairly certain we all know just how much salt is used in cooking. Well when I was reading The Classic of Tea by Lu Yu I noticed him describing adding a little bit of salt to his water as well. I tried it a few months ago and failed to remember what he wrote right after talking about putting salt in his tea, which was to be very careful of not putting in too much. Haha. It was disgusting. I've always hated salt water and tea doesn't really do anything to improve the flavor. It was very sad. However in March I found some Lava Salt, or basically salt with charcoal mixed in it. I have used charcoal to purify my water before (and loved using it), and I was curious about salt, so I figured this would be a doubly cool thing to try out. 

I have tried it with both iodized table salt and the charcoal salt, and I think I've noticed two interesting things. (When I get back to school and my beloved glass electric kettle I'll be able to do better controlled testing)

1. The mouth-feel of the teas that I put salt into becomes fuller and smoother. I think the salt takes away a lot of astringency.
2. I don't have to go to the bathroom as much!
3. I'll test this next week when I start summer Bikram (HOT- you sweat like hell) yoga, but I'm pretty sure this is keeping me better hydrated. Haha

Its too bad I don't have my tea club here over the summer. I'd definitely test this all out on them. Hehehehe. Voluntarily, of course... But if any of you readers try this yourself, please let me know what your results are! I don't hear very often about people really pushing themselves to either drink a ton of one type of tea all at once in order to see the results on themselves or salting their water. FYI I don't put in more than a TINY pinch per 32 oz. Maybe 1/4 tsp. (I'll also test that out more accurately.)

Dear Summer

Sometimes I feel like I live in a hurricane. Nothing is certain until the last minute it always seems like. I don't mind living on the edge like this, but when things don't seem to be working out I do end up longing for some stability in my life. However that never lasts long because I'm fairly certain I would be bored out of my mind without things going on, new horizons to test, new problems to overcome, new things to think about. Of course, this too is only a present moment feeling.

Summer vacation started about a month ago for me, and already it's almost over! I still technically have 3 months of time off from school, but about two weeks ago I chanced upon a lab opening in Boston and got in! So back off to the East Coast with me next week! 

At least I have my tea. Almost no matter where I go in this country or world, there will always be tea. Right now I'm drinking some very delicious Shui Jin Gui Wuyi Oolong from Verdant Tea. I'm very glad I still have some of this because I had just been craving that smooth chocolaty-mineral wuyi cliff tea taste. 

This summer is going to be pretty interesting. There are a lot of big things happening in the world right now, and personally I hope this will also be a big time of growth for me. In the US we just had a verdict today finally on whether or not genes could be patented. I'm extremely relieved that at least one branch of the US Government isn't completely grid-locked and came to the logical and best conclusion: NO. Still waiting to hear on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 from California which are the other two current blockbuster cases. Then we've got the too violent and bloody rebellion going on in Syria, the results of equalizing marriage in France, the problems with suppressing free speech in Turkey, Russia's attack on LGBTQ people, Europe's economic troubles continuing, the US' and Japan's economic troubles alleviating, possible corruption problems in Singapore with their last election, I actually have no idea what movies are coming out this summer that look good aside from Star Trek which already came out and I already saw (ITS AMAZING GO. GO. GO. And now I have to watch every single episode while they're still on Netflix....), Avatar: Korra Book 2: Spirits is coming out sometime this year, and a million other pieces of history in the works. Haha. Don't get me started on my opinions on all of that. Right here and now all I'm doing is drinking my tea.

As the summer equinox approaches too I feel like taking a brief glance back at what's happened already this year. I traveled Japan, bought lots of tea in Japan, my beloved cat of 15 years passed away (had her since kindergarten), came back to the US, went to school again, had lots of success starting the tea club at my school, enjoyed my classes, got into a lab for next year where I get to study tea, went to New York City for the first time, went to the Tea Festival there, my sweet grandmother and last grandparent passed away, I learned a lot in my classes and they ended, enjoyed a lot of time with friends at school, summer vacation started and I enjoyed even more time with friends over here, spent time with my cute dog, finally got to visit most of my favorite Seattle and Portland tea shops, spent time with my little brothers, finished Avatar: The Last Airbender with them (and I'm very proud to say that by the last few episodes they had the entire opener memorized), I think I got my littlest brother interested in tea, definitely Japan (yay! Previously he had liked Australia and my complaint was, 'but they speak English there!' Hahaha), now I got into this new internship, and am just enjoying the present, and this delicious tea, as time trundles along. Isn't it amazing how tea is such a big part of our lives, but it happens during and between these other larger events? I'm very glad I'm always able to slow down during the midst of all of this with a cup of tea.

You know, I really can't tell if I'm addicted to tea or not. I have gone without tea for nearly a week in recent months, and have been fine. But then there are days like today when I wake up with massive headaches. If it doesn't go away after a little while on it's own I'll take some pain medicine, but the thing is, when I drink it with water, that reminds me that I should start the pot for tea for the day. So once the water finally boils (it takes forever in my parent's huge stove kettle), usually I don't catch it before then so I have to wait for it to cool down to the right temperature for whichever tea I'm drinking, and by the time I finally put that tea into my mouth it's probably been about 20-30 minutes since I took the pain medicine, and always a few minutes after I've started drinking my tea the headache is gone. Haha. I really need to drink tea without the pain meds when this happens again in order to really test this out. But I've noticed that usually puerh will have the most remarked effect on me. I know I've written about this before, you know how I've said that sometimes when I drink puerh I get the same sense of relief as if a headache has just gone away? I have no idea what that's all about, but I think its pretty interesting.

Now remember that my research next semester will be on the effect of tea on intestinal bacteria: well I read a very interesting article the other day about a correlation between aggressive behavior in Autistic children, gut bacteria, and serotonin. (FYI: I am NOT at all of the vein of thinking that would dare suggest that diet causes autism. However I am always open to research on the idea of how diet affects the brain, because obviously consuming alcohol does, and there are significant (but not completely altering) links between mood disorders and gluten intolerance.) One of the things it mentions in this article is that while serotonin is extremely important in the brain and moods, over 90% of the body's serotonin is found in the gut. Note, this isn't saying that because these children have problems with serotonin levels and their digestive system that they have Autism, but rather noticing that GI serotonin and bacterial overgrowth problems are present in conjunction with a gene mutation at least partially responsible for Autism. Personally I find it very reasonable that Autistic children would become aggressive or have other behavioral problems when they're constipated. That's not a pleasant state at all! Haha. But when thinking about tea/diet, neurotransmitters, and digestive bacteria, I just thought that this article was very interesting. I'm definitely going to check out the book mentioned in the article for one.

And the whistle is going off on the kettle again.