Tag Archives: tea

A Thousand Tiny Losses

August 2, 2023 By in travel Tags: , , , Leave a comment

A few days ago, I called my husband to pick me up from work. This was weird for two reasons. First, I had ridden my bike to work. Second, I felt fine and could totally have ridden home. So…why the ride? It’s because I had a huge mug of tea, and I couldn’t just chug it down before leaving. I also couldn’t bring myself to pour it down the sink, because this is the last of the tea we got at the spice souk in Dubai. I’m not going to find more of it here.

When I took a shower at the gym and removed the last of the stuck-on garbage left from our crossing the equator ceremony, I gave a little sigh. When I threw away the last wrapper from the last foreign snacks we’d bought, I stared into the bin for a while. With each loss, our time at sea gets further and further away. When I finished the last of the tea I’d bought in Singapore from a shop that would happily ship me more, I had to stop myself from ordering an entire case to replace it. But the tea from Dubai, an unexpectedly delightful cup, I can’t replace. I didn’t want to waste a single drop, so I made my husband pick me and my bicycle up so I could savor what’s left of it.

As of today, we haven’t been home for as long as we were at sea, but it still seems like a lifetime ago. I still haven’t finished the scrapbook, and some of our souvenirs have been repurposed. But there are so many things I’m losing…

What did I eat for lunch in the cafe in the visitor’s center at Stonehenge? I remember it had just started to rain, and we weren’t due back on the bus for half an hour, and that I had something I really liked, but what was it?

What was the name of the woman who sat by me at lunch in Muscat? I remember that she and her husband had booked a world cruise just before COVID, but it was cancelled. And then a year ago, her husband died, and she decided to go on a cruise by herself.

I remember that I took an improv class, but other than the fact that a guy named Roger and I won the “who is the best-loved person on the ship” game (it’s like musical chairs, except you have to cluster in groups when the music stops, and anyone not in a group is out, presumably because they are not sufficiently loved), but I don’t remember anything else we did in that class.

There was a lecturer who was just terrible. So much so that I remember that his slide show included photos of his primary school and some vintage cars, but I don’t remember the actual subject of his lecture. I just remember that it had nothing to do with his primary school or vintage cars.

Am I letting these things go because they’re less important than the feel of the heat in Singapore? Or the sight of chickens living deep in a cave in Malaysia? Or how it felt to ride in one of the ship’s lifeboats on rough sea? I can’t say. But what I can say is that I had so many experiences that even if I forgot most of them, there would still be enough to think back on for the rest of my life.

Centenary World Cruise Day 86: Mauritius

April 12, 2023 By in travel Tags: , , Leave a comment

We spent today in Mauritius touring a tea plantation, a vanilla plantation, and a museum – all owned by the same family.

The island itself was astonishing – the most fertile-looking soil I’ve ever seen. The only surfaces not covered with growing things were the paved roads and the buildings. Every verge, garden, or bit of open ground was covered with grasses, shrubs, and trees, and even those trees and shrubs were covered with more creepers. I was so proud of myself the first time I was able to keep a plant alive for more than two months, but here, a person could poke a stick into the ground and grow an entire tree in no time.

The richest red soil I’ve ever seen

The vanilla plantation was interesting. We got to see the production cycle of vanilla, and it’s a much longer and more manual process than I realized. From initial planting to finished product takes 5 years (four of them are spent just waiting for the plant to have its first flowers). The flowers, which are both male and female have to be pollinated by hand by women (apparently it’s always done by women) who are called “wedding planners.” They can do 1500-2000 flowers in a morning (because it can only be done in the morning). And then the actual preparation of the ripe vanilla pods is mostly manual and involves blanching, drying in the sun, drying in the shade, sticking in a box for months, then sorting by size. All this is to say that I now appreciate vanilla much more than I did.

Vanilla orchids, with coconut husks as mulch

The tea plantation was…disappointing. From the moment we got off the bus and saw the tea leaves coming down a chute overhead onto the ground, where a group of men was picking up the leaves and shoving them into burlap bags, I knew this was going to just make me sad. Before we left the ship, I had visions of discovering a delicious tea I’d never had and bringing pounds of it home, but the smell in the air wasn’t lovely tea. It was alfalfa. As in horse food.

We watched the tea being processed in huge machines, and seeing the end result – tiny, cremated-looking fragments of tea leave shoved into paper teabags – didn’t do anything to give me hope.

The machine that sorts tea crushed tea leaves by size

Later, we went to a lovely restaurant where we had lunch, after which we had a tea tasting. We tried six of the eight varieties of tea they made at that factory, and every single one of them had the same flavor – as though it had been brewed inside a horse and decanted out the backside. Really, really awful.

The island itself was interesting. There was an area near the port that had a lot of high-end shops and houses, but as you got away from the city, the infrastructure diminished sharply. There’s a real dichotomy between rich and poor here. Some parts of the country looked like parts of Egypt – dirt roads, tiny shops, a lot of ad hoc building. It made sense, considering that the island’s main source of income is tourism. As we got off the boat this morning, there was a giant poster exhorting us to consider retiring to Mauritius. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Centenary World Cruise Day 44-45: I Can Sea for Miles

March 9, 2023 By in travel Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Day 44:

Today is a day at sea – one of two between Singapore and Thailand. And I’m sick. Like, snotty, hacking, coughing up phlegm sick. I started the day with room service breakfast – oatmeal and lots of orange juice. I made a pot of tea in the new teapot and drank it, then made another. I had to carefully consider how much tea I was going to drink, because the water from the taps here is nasty, and the drinking water comes in 1-liter bottles, of which we get 2 a day when they make up our room. Except that they haven’t had a chance to make up our room since yesterday morning, because I’ve been ill.

It made me think about the kind of packing I used to do for my 10-day residencies at grad school. I’d take plastic wine glasses and a corkscrew, dishes, sharp knives and scissors, a tiny cutting board, a fruit bowl, laundry detergent and fabric softener, all kinds of over the counter meds (Excedrin, Sudafed, Mucinex, antacids), a power strip, a sewing kit, a small electric kettle, a teapot, tea, first aid supplies. This all went into a big plastic box, because I drove to residency and had the room for it. We also took all this stuff on trips for piping competitions, which were normally only two or three days. And these trips were in cities, where I’d be near grocery stores, etc.

All that stuff, packed for less than two weeks, and yet, I didn’t pack most of those things for a four-month trip where I would have very limited access to stores! Here are some things I regret not bringing:

  • Command hooks (there are just never enough hooks, and they’re not where you want them)
  • Normal scissors (I brought hair scissors, but you can’t use those on anything else)
  • Sudafed and Mucinex (why did I think we wouldn’t get sick on a four-month trip?)
  • Powdered hummus (they never have enough vegan protein options, and hummus is always a nice snack)

Having not brought that stuff, here are some things I learned from shopping abroad:

  • Other countries have unexpected restrictions on pharmaceuticals (for instance, in the UK, you can’t get more than 32 pills of the over-the-counter painkiller paracetamol – in the US, you can get Tylenol in Kentucky Fried Chicken-sized buckets)
  • Speaking of pharmaceuticals, other countries don’t call stuff the same thing we do, or use different drugs for the same effect, so you have to do some decoding (we couldn’t find guaifenesin, an expectorant, but we could find this other stuff that works even better and doesn’t taste like burnt hair)
  • In Asian countries, people are expected to be smaller than they are here (if a piece of clothing says “one size,” it’s a good bet it’s at most an American size medium)
  • Hummus is mysteriously elusive – we haven’t been able to find it in Dubai, Malaysia or Singapore, and I feel like we’re just not looking in the right place – either it’s sold in a can or jar, or it’s sold as a powdered mix. However they sell it (if they, indeed, sell it), we haven’t been able to find it.

Hopefully, I’ll be over this creeping crud in time for Thailand. 

Day 45:

All the days at sea are eerily the same. But I got a lot of work done today.