Beomosa Monks! @ The 7th Busan International Tea Cultural Festival Day 1

 As you can see the main square of the Busan Cultural Center is filled with booths staffed by various artisans showing their wares: potters furniture makers and tea vendors.

 Powdered green tea is quite popular now with several booths serving free tea.

 I ran into a few monk friends there. This is Bapsan Senim from Beomosa. My wife and I had tea with him on a few occasions. He was showing me the antique tea vessels they have on display there : from as far back as 2000 BC ! From the collections shown you can get a real sense of the development of tea pots, tea jars and tea bowls and tea cups.

Theres a regular Japanese tea ceremony demonstration that takes place in one of the lower galleries. I shall conduct an interview with them tomorrow !

 Scrolls are also on display. The Cultural Center has two big galleries and both are taken up by the Tea Festival : There's lots to see !
Some with poems, some Zen scrolls as well...

 Incense containers....

 Tomorrow @ 2:00 there will be various tea servings. (I'm not sure if they will be ceremonies or not...) I believe it is by invitation...Regardless I'm looking forward to watching the proceedings.

 The Beomosa Monks have several tables booked for tomorrow !

 There's a display showing the Traditional Korean Wedding Ceremony. There was nobody there to interview at the time. I'll try to catch them tomorrow...

So there you have it : Lots to see and well worth full afternoon at the Busan Cultural Center. Not sure how to get there? Just tell a taxi driver : Busan Moon Hwa Hwey Gwan Ka Jew Say Oh. Its near the UN Cemetery on most tourist maps.

7th Busan International Tea Cultural Festival

This coming Friday I'm pleased to be covering the 7th Busan International Tea Cultural Festival.
It will be held at the Busan Cultural Center (Busan Moonhwa Waygwan) This August 31st to September 2nd. A fine way for celebrating and taking the edge off after the typhoon that is hitting here rather quite soon.

Among many other things there will be booths covering Tea Incense, Tea Savories, Tea Art, Japanese Matcha Tea Ceremony, Flower Arrangements for Tea Services, Buddhist Tea Offering Ceremony...

Special events taking place throughout the festival to include tea prayer, tea meditation, tea music (of various sorts), Korean dancing.
Many of these special events will take place September 1st and 2nd. Hope to see some of you there !

Busan Tea and Craft Fair

Drop by while you can! The Bi-annual Busan Tea & Craft Fair is on at BEXCO. Interestingly enough it coincides with the Cafe Fair also going on at BEXCO. However, unless you are going to join a coffee franchise I suggest you drop by the Tea & Craft fair: Theres lots of stuff you can buy for your home or as gifts !

As you can see here there are alot of Korean tea sets for sale and at decent prices too !This year there are at least 3 vendors from China mostly selling Pu'er tea.

Mother of Pearl !

 Portable tea sets are also available for about 100,000 won (100USD) to 200,000 won.

There are also more potters this time as well ! Every 6 months it gets better and better. So drop by BEXCO the fair is open only until tomorrow !

Praises of the Korean Teapot: An ideal gift idea!

These days in the west restaurants, tea shop owners and conoisseurs are all singing the praises of loose leaf tea. There has been a mass proliferation of teashops in Canada and the U.S. selling loose leaf tea. Yet the West is lacking hte hardware required to get the most out of this 'loose leaf' tea that is so widely promoted and praised. The concept is simple: With loose leaf tea, in principle, the tea leaves are free to swish around and blossom open in the water releasing their fragrance more and providing consumers with a better cup of tea.

The problem the West is having (that has been solved here in Asia for centuries) is with hardware. Most western tepots have one hole for the spout and must use a wire mesh insert inside to hold the leaves. The problem with this is that the leaves haven't the full pot to roam around in. A more horrible solution is the tea infuser pictured at right:

Loose leaf tea, yet confined in a small ball like infuser. You might as well be using a teabag then ! Here in Korea we use teapots that don't require an infuser ~or~ a wire mesh insert ! Its what's inside that counts !

Here are two of my 3 Korean teapots I have at home. The one on the left was a gift. The larger one on the right is one I made myself.

 As you can see inside the solution is mindblowingly simple: instead of one hole there are tonnes of tiny ones forming a filter for the leaves ! This way the leaves are free to roam around the entire pot. With all the loose leaf tea shops opening up across Europe and North America the Korean teapot is an excellent gift to send your folks overseas while you are here in Asia!
Here in Busan Nampodong and Pyunghwa Markets have plenty of Korean tea sets. In Nampo market the Korean teasets @ Tamina go for about 20,000 - 40,000 won each.
Now I'm just wondering when the potters in the west will pick up on this idea...

Sakura Cha 桜茶

Last week I ran into some websites mentioning Sakura Cha or Cherry Blossom Tea. One of which involved cherry blossoms infused in vinegar as a health drink. The others were more palatable.

Following the directions on a Youtube site that had rather garbled English describing how to make Sakura Cha I ran out to find ... that most of the cherry blossoms had fallen from the trees and had been swept away with the rain.

Luckily I found some remaining on trees on the East side of downtown Busan (Someyeon). As you can see in the picture the blossoms are plentiful there still.

My first steeping of the tea turned out to be less than satisfactory though: Even after a 10minute steeping the tea was still insipid, though it had a finely fuzzy aftertaste a bit though.

Over the course of this month I shall dry the tea leaves and lightly roast them in the frypan as is done with green tea.

Interestingly enough the Japanese have several words for cherry blossoms depending on when they are in cherry blossom season :

first [cherry] blossoms* (hatsu hana, mid spring).

cherry [blossoms*] (sakura, late spring).

[cherry] blossoms* (hana, late spring).

late cherry [blossoms*] (osozakura, late spring).

remaining [cherry] blossoms* (zanka, late spring).

My cherry blossoms are clearly zanka which would also possibly explain why the tea is so bland...Suffice to say I shall try drying and roasting and until then, the jury is still out on this kind of tea...I'll keep you posted...