Matcha tea

I am not sure why the urge for Matcha suddenly popped up in my mind. Maybe I have a need for tranquility, that I am not getting satisfied at the moment.

First and only time I drank Matcha was in Rikugien Garden near Komagome station last October in a small tea house in the middle of the garden.


I had decided to revisit the garden, for the third time, as I now have visited this garden every time I have been in Japan. The other two times had been late in the afternoon and this would be the first time visiting it before noon.

Inside the garden is a small open tea house, and one of the things I had been looking forward to was to enjoy a cup of tea there. Unfortunately when I got there it was filled with a small group of slightly noisy American (from the sound of it) tourists and most of the locals seemed to have fled the premises, and so did I. I walked a bit more around and when I saw, from the other side of the pond, thanks to a nice big zoom lens on my camera, that they were leaving, I decided to go back and fulfill my dream.

When I came back to the tea house it had already started to fill up with both young and older local women, but I managed to grab a part of a bench and ordered a set of, what seemed the standard choice, Green Tea with Sweets, which I now know was Matcha.


So in the shadow of the roof, it was around noon and getting quite warm, I enjoyed the foamy light green tea among the quiet chit-chat of the local women (I was the only man there) and a nice very sweet sweet, which had to be separated into at least 5 parts to be eaten. It was all like I had imagined.

To my regret I did not buy any tea at the tea house. But as I now have the urge for Matcha, I will have to shopping for some tea and at least the bamboo brush, the other preparation utensils can wait and it can be decided later, whether I want those as well.

My original posting about that day can be found here.

Are my cats plotting to kill me?

According to this website, they definitely are. But then again who would provide their food and water, and clean up their litter box, if I am gone.

Also took a test and it confirmed my worries:

And with 2 cats, I am goner!

Obscured by clouds

Burning roof of the VU Center in Albertslund on April 1st.

(Motorola ZN5)

As the cloud layer was somewhat low, it looked like the smoke was clinging to the bottom of the clouds, although the smoke was in fact rising up through the clouds.

Into the sky

I am not sure why I like this picture. Because the technology versus nature thing, or may be just because my girlfriend was with me when the picture was taken, and I miss her at the moment.


Very probably the later.

What the antenna does, is that it makes one look up into the sky sometimes. Often most of the time is spent looking at things at the ground or near eye-height, only rarely do I look up. Of course I look into the horizon, but looking directly up is not a visual agenda that I perform on a daily basis. The antenna can make me do this, at least when I notice the antenna, but I do so more often than I realize. Why is that important? Because I tend to do things the way I always do them. It is so easy fall into a pattern and keep repeating that pattern. Doing something that falls outside the box is important once in a while, otherwise why exist.