The Quest for the Tea

One of the things i loved about Morocco is the Tea. To a thought junkie like me, any drink that you can use as an excuse to sit down, read and ponder, is a drink that is worth drinking. Whether it was on the balcony overlooking a small parking lot in Meknes, or the cafes that flourish all over that odd country, the tea was seldom a disappointment. It was a useful replacement for coffee, something i have been known to overdue, and it was one tradition i hoped to bring home with me. Unfortunately, this task proved more difficult than i thought.

Having grown up in a tea drinking family, i thought the process of making this beverage at home would be rather easy. I had already gotten a good approximation on how to make it in Morocco, and had produced some very good pots of it already. The tea is called Mint Tea, and it made by brewing a really dark tea while adding a handful of green mint sprigs and quite a bit of sugar. You then pour the tea into a cup, and pour that cup back into the pot to mix it.

The first two problems I run into are ingredients. The tea that i used in Morocco wasn't labeled in English, and it came in pellets made of rolled up leaves. I assumed that finding similar tea would be easy in America, but it turns out that it is actually kind of hard to find tea that isn't sold in tea bags. Green Mint sprigs was also something that is kind of hard to come by. Fortunately, my parents had planted mint in the garden this summer, so all i had to find is the tea.

The first break i had in locating the tea came with a random trawl on Wikipedia. I find out that mint tea isn't a very exact term, and that the type of tea that we drank in Morocco was also called Tuareg Tea. The actually type of tea leave used are a really dark green tea called Gunpowder Tea, named this because the round pellets resemble gunpowder pellets.

This revelation brings its own problems. The first is that there is still no loose leaf teas that i can find for a reasonable price, and the second is that all the green teas in America avoid being dark. So my search continues for a dark green tea, and a way to get this tea at a coffee shop. Maybe someday America will turn away from its large light teas, and embrace a multicultural approach to serving tea.

Jets and Temples

Well this was written quite a bit ago, but since it is finished, i thought i would post it

The roar of the jets as the passed low over the school felt oddly comforting. Living near an air force base that hosts large exercises every year, jets, helicopters, and even the silent predator drones were a familiar sight or sound. It is almost like these jets were proof that Morocco was a part of the same world as Alaska. Some people were surprised by the sudden roar, but it brought a smile to my face; not the smile of wonder, but a smile of comforts: a habitual seat at a coffee shop, or fresh smelling sheets. The irony lies in that I am here to study culture and peace, and the only sound I recognize is the symbol of modern warfare.

My journey to this foreign place began with a late night flight to Utah. Stepping of the plane, my first thoughts were on the interesting combination of two different cultures. Looking for a usual fix of caffeine, I find a local chain that roasts its coffee in Salt Lake. I sit down to set up my blog, and I soon figure out that merely staying in the airport for my layover did not bode well. I gather my courage to do something that is not my forte: diving into a place that is unknown to me. Walking past security, I know that there is really no coming back.

The first struggle I have is with the Utah Transit Authority. I have not realized that there could be a worse public transportation system in a developed country than that of Anchorage, Alaska, but I was wrong. The bus station for the airport resides on the second floor of the short term parking area, and it consisted of two small shelters, similar to a medium sized bus station in Anchorage. To me, this was shocking. Waiting thirty minutes for the bus, it takes me to a bus station in a rather industrialized area, and it only briefly passed through the outskirts of central Salt Lake. Not wanting to wait for another bus, I decided to hike towards downtown. While I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, I decided to go vaguely towards the Mormon Temple. As I head in that direction, I pass the sports center in Salt Lake. Outside, a sale of team merchandise was occurring, advertised as a “warehouse sale”. This sale made me giggle a little bit, the light blue of whatever sports team that calls salt lake home is all over everything, hats, jerseys, and people. It reminded me of a baby blue pickup truck that I still have sitting out in our driveway, though the pickup is now spray-paint black, and the team is still powdery blue. While I am a fan of watching a game with sports fans, going on a regular day to buy merchandise seems a bit odd to me. I feel like jerseys should commemorate an important occasion, or bought to be used a gym cloths, rather than bought in mass to be worn regularly.

Arriving at the Mormon Temple, I am again reminded that I am already in a kind of foreign place. The beautiful, but uninspiring, statuary almost lay out almost randomly through a walled off compound/garden intrigued me. I have always been fascinated by religious iconography, even if it is a relatively young sect that is trying too hard. As I stare at a spire topped with a bronze statue of a seagull, I am approached by two slightly pretty girls somewhere around my age. These girls were most likely fulfilling their one year missionary requirement. I did my best to act like I had never heard a similar speil, understanding how these talks can be from my attempts at door to door campaigning, but my playing dumb to be respectful shows through a bit, an one of the girls does her best to disengage the other from the conversation. They hand me a flier, which I accept gracefully, and use it as a badge showing that I had been approached already for the rest of my stay. I glance at the statues of characters that have been ridiculed in popular culture, Joseph Smith especially, and the tablets that were given to him by the Disciples. I head back towards the bus station, struggling with the public transportation system, and head away towards Morocco.