Insadong Tea Time :)

This morning my friend Anna (Germany) and  I had to run an errand to pick up our alien registration cards, which was fairly far away (30 minutes by subway, with two transfers). To make the trip worthwhile, we decided to shop around the area of Insadong afterwards because it was so close to the immigration office. 

Insadong is a very touristy shopping area. The main street has lots of stores selling paper fans and Korean slippers, but there are also a lot of authentic stores as well where you can buy Korean ceramic or hanboks (traditional Korean dresses). Anna and I we just there for the window-shopping, but it was really interesting to see what they all had there.

Anna has a Korean travel book that recommended a traditional Korean tea store that sells the special green tea produced on Korea's on Jeju Island (located off the southern most part of Korea). It was wonderful! The first floor is like a shop, where you can smell and buy all the varieties of tea. Although they specialize in green tea, they also carried black, herbal, and oolong varieties which are so hard to find here!

One of the tea booths. 

This man was handing out samples of the famous Jeju green tea (which was AMAZING! It was really fruity for just a plain green tea). Here he is mixing up the tea leaves in this large basin.

On the second story they had a little cafe where you can buy a cup of tea and cakes if you wish. Anna and I both agreed that we needed to do this. Because I bought plain green tea from the grocery store to make in my room, I was really looking for a fruity flavour of tea so I picked "red papaya black tea" while Anna picked a 'special' kind of tea called "wedding tea".

Here is our teas! WOW!!!!

The teas were SO AMAZING. Mine was really fruity like what I hoped and Anna's seemed like a white tea that was very floral. We each got our own tray that had the pot, a bowl, a cup, and two little cookies. The waitress showed me that you first pour the tea into the bowl, then pour the tea in the bowl into the cup (you can see the bowl has a pouring spout). The cookies were good too! They were both shortbread and the green was green tea flavour while the red was earl grey. Mmmmm :)

Tea makes me happy :)

View of the Insadong shopping street from the second-story cafe.

Bronwyn and Larissa: the whole time I was here I thought of you guys and wished you would magically appear so we could go crazy over all the teas!

Mom and Dad: when you come to visit me in May, I am for sure going to take you here!!!

Thanks for reading everyone! Miss you! :)