Tea lesson

On Saturday I went into Tokyo with two of my friends to take a lesson in chai tea making. A very popular tea shop here called Lupicia, offers classes in how to make the different kinds of tea they sell. We decided that the chai tea class would be fun to take, so my friend made the reservations for the Roppongi store. We took the train up and arrived at Roppongi station without a problem. Then we proceeded to get lost for 15-20 minutes trying to find the store. Even armed with the map the store provided on their website and their address we still had trouble finding it. We weren't the only ones though. We stopped in a store and asked for directions and the man didn't really know where it was. We asked two men on the street and they had no idea. We even asked a policeman who gave us directions that ended up being in the wrong direction. Luckily we're resourceful women. We managed to find it on our own and even arrived right on time.

Our teacher for the lesson was very helpful and spoke wonderful english. We were served cinnamon chai tea for a refreshment to start our class off. It was excellent! Our teacher then made us some chai tea with their new vanilla tea leaves which was wonderful. And I don't even like vanilla. Next she had us make our own tea. We decided to go with a cardamon and pepper tea. This is what our tea looking like while it was cooking:

It doesn't look very appetizing, does it? Trust me though it wasn't too bad, especially for our first time making chai tea. After the class was over we of course had to go buy everything to make our own tea at home.

Then we decided to eat lunch before heading back to base. We stopped in at an Indian restaurant which was pretty full so we knew we made a good choice. We enjoyed their curry lunch set with lassi. After lunch we got back on the train. We splurged on the express train home because it would cut off 20 minutes and it had reserved seats so we could all sit down. The train was definitely worth the extra money. After arriving at our final train station I caught a ride back to base with one my friends because we were meeting our husbands at a rug auction. Hubby and I didn't buy anything, mostly because the rugs were worth around $5000 or more and we didn't think they would hold up well in our house. Hairy cats, a messy toddler, a soon to be messy newborn, and an expensive rug don't mix well. Oh well, maybe we'll pick up a rug at the bazaar this weekend.