Aug 26, 2010

cheers for the tea communities

The summer trip took longer than I had expected. There is so much to catch up with the tea community! In fact, the tea community never fails to surprise me and inspire me.

By reading people's tasting notes, I've learned that a generous tea drinker at Steepster kindly shared tea she purchased from our store with a bunch of other Steepsterites. I feel so grateful to this nice gal whom I haven't exchanged a word yet. Because of her generosity, more people got to know and like our tea. More importantly, she spread love of tea in the community. Some people who had never experienced oolong started to like this tea genre, and some people who had never tried dark oolong fell in love with it.  

While I was away, people had fabulous discussions and contributed great thoughts on this blog. And of course, there are so many nice essays to catch up with from fellow tea drinkers' blogs, including the monthly blog carnival held by Association of Tea Bloggers.

Also during the summer, Leafbox Tea has got its new outlook and, as always, great articles! Rate Tea Net has grown a lot bigger over a summer!

There was a lot going on in my personal life in the past summer. I've spent weeks without a drop of tea. And I've also spent days drinking so many types of teas in a row that we called it tea mardi gras. To my great pleasure, in Beijing, I finally got to meet a Korean Teachatter whom I've admired for a long time! He and his Chinese-Medicine-Doctor-to-be friend, who is also a tea aficionado, took me to fantastic places only "insiders" can get in :-D Both my fellow Teachatter and I realized, with a bit surprise, that it was the first time for both of us to ever meet a tea friend from an online tea community. Yet there are so many great tea drinkers from these online communities, and I think I've got to go out more and meet more of them!

The summer flied away so fast. My goals in the coming autumn are working harder on tea, meeting more tea friends and building up more tea karma by giving away more tea to fellow tea lovers.

6 comments:

Ho Go said...

Sounds like your Beijing trip was an eye opener. I would also like to meet that Korean teachatter and may look him up when I visit Beijing.

I've met 4 teachatters here in Bangkok. Great fun and plenty of tea to share. You must come and visit.

Gingko said...

So many teachatters over there in Bangkok! I've got to come to visit someday!

If you go to Beijing, find chrl42 at teachat. He can take you to great tea places and teapot places :D I am from Beijing. But I think our Korean teachatter knows more local tea people than I do.

Brett said...

Welcome home Gingko! I look forward to reading about some of these "tea mardi gras" ;)

MarshalN said...

Lemme know next time you go to Beijing -- I have a few friends who you may want to meet. You speak Chinese, I presume?

Alex Zorach said...

It's exciting to me how so many of these tea communities are relatively new, and they are all thriving. I was inspired by this post of yours to write a post in my blog, in which I wrote about TeaViews, another great site that you haven't mentioned here.

I hope to write more posts like this about different sites in the future, including Steepster, LeafBox Tea, and others.

Thank you for this post!

Gingko said...

Yeah! I like Teaviews very much too. I am grateful to the reviewers not just for their positive feedbacks but also for their detailed and thoughtful comments.

And there are a few other sites. I've summarized them in a link on top right corner of this blog.

Through these fast growing tea sites I see a bright future for tea :D