We arrived at the festival and were a little surprised at the setup. I'm not sure what I was expecting but it wasn't long tables running the length of a hotel conference room covered in tea samples. We were given a little booklet with a description (in Japanese) of each of the teas with the prices and room to take notes. There were just over 30 teas to try and I can assure you that I could not tell the difference between at least 28 of them. Each of us would push our way up to a tea and grab three cups and meet back to swap. Probably not the best idea since there were a few times that we were trying to juggle three cups of extremely hot tea, our booklet, and cookies. Ahhh, the cookies. What a feeding frenzy that was. About a quarter of the way through the teas we were all commenting that we couldn't feel our tongues and had a bad taste in our mouth, when we saw a woman making her way through the crowd carrying a bowl of small cookies. Within 30 seconds they were all gone. We managed to get two apiece. As I looked around though I noticed that everyone had grabbed handfuls. Ok, I can play that game. The next time someone came around with food we were pushing our way to the front filling our empty teacups up.
By the time we left I was stuffed and my tongue had lost all feeling. By the time we got on the train to go home I was feeling jittery from all the caffeine. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon and I even came home with a goody-bag filled with a nice teacup and samples of tea (thankfully not Darjeeling, because I never want to drink that kind again).
