Culture in a cup

I've always called tea "culture in a cup." It's a great way to explore and appreciate the world's cultures really without ever leaving the classroom. This is the Geography of Tea course. We basically spend an entire semester tasting and exploring all of the teas and the tea producing regions from a lot of the countries like Southeast Asia and over into India and Africa. So it's just a great way to explore physical and human geography. "So can you ID any smell on it is the question?" For about half an hour of the class, we do lecture in some form, and then for about 45 minutes, we actually get to participate in a tasting and sensory evaluation of those teas. We usually do three infusions. We write down what we taste, smell, see on our tasting sheets. My favorite type of tea was sweet tea before I came to this class. So I'm really enjoying this class. It's opened my eyes a lot. I have definitely learned more than I thought there was to know about tea in this class. It's a geography of tea class, but it's also kind of a geography of Asia and, like, really any region that produces tea. We learned a lot about those regions as well, kind of using the context of tea. I really do believe in getting my students outside of the classroom whenever possible, too. And so we're going to go up to Washington and Lee University and participate in a Japanese tea ceremony. In this semester, we've been spending time in China, virtually. And so now we're about to shift gears and explore the teas in Japan. And so, Dr. Ikeda does a really good job of explaining the culture and the process that goes into that tea ceremony. Her students will lead us in what that ceremony would look like, and then the students will actually whisk their own tea with a whisk and a matcha bowl. "Beautiful." I've got 21 students and 18 different majors in the class. And so I get students from all over the university, and it's really fun to see them interact with each other. This is such a small slice of human history and human culture. But it's really satisfying for me to see that open up broader conversations. They really get a deeper appreciation of physical geography, human geography, and culture.