recommended readings

A few articles that I feel most people would enjoy!

1. I learned of this article from @jackie at this teatra.de discussion. I've heard that Pakistanis are crazy about tea. It looks like their tea is a lot different from the tea I drink. But the enthusiasm is intriguing!

By the way, Pakistan, when not in war, is a beautiful country. The photo on top of this post was taken in Pakistan by The Cyclist Seto (not me, another guy from Seto clan), and more of his Pakistani pictures can be found here.

2. If you want to learn more about Long Jing of this year, here is Long Jing report from Walker Tea Walker, features with photos from my friend 家住龙井村 :-)

3. From Steepsters about Mormon tea drinkers:
http://steepster.com/discuss/5149-any-mormon-tea-drinkers-on-the-board?page=1&post_id=89719

This is the first time I've heard that it's arguable whether there is a Mormon tea taboo! I had always thought that it's a Mormon rule that tea drinking is not allowed. But this Mormon tea drinker says that the scripture didn't specify tea (and not even coffee!) but as he clarified, "part of our code of health (called Word of Wisdom and adopted in the early 1800’s) is to avoid alcohol, tobacco and “hot drinks” which were later interpreted to mean coffee and tea."
I don't have much idea about how religiously correct this above statement is. On the one hand, I was surprised. On the other hand, it's not surprising to me that humans used their own understanding to interpret religious scriptures and made it rules of the God. It happened for many times in many religious organizations, right?

4. A thread from a Chinese tea forum with a lot of yixing photos. Very high level exhibitions of non-collector group yixing show. (The text is not important. Just see the photos would be enough.)
http://teabbs.zjol.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=169825&extra=&page=1

I see a lot of discussions all the time about "tuition teapots" and how new yixing users gain experience. Although it's always important to have hands-on experience to learn, personally, I would think it's more important to see a lot of good teapots than putting your hands on a lot of bad teapots to learn (let alone those bad teapots usually cost money for you to put your hands on them!).

I once wrote about how to deal with obsessive (tea / tea ware) shopping, and made a list of strategies. Maybe I could add to the list one more strategy - window shopping! For tea, we can't get much of the "taste" from window shopping. But for tea ware, I think window-shopping on good stuff would do a lot more good than buying bad stuff.

The tea ware board of teachat, especially those threads on the very top of the board, are also nice places for "window shopping".