Japanese people love green tea- this is something you’ll notice after an hour in Japan. Green tea is everywhere- in restaurants, coffee shop, in vending machines, in cakes, biscuits and sweets. Starbucks sells matcha latte, KitKat has a matcha flavour. But it all starts with traditional green tea and tea ceremony. I was lucky enough to see how it’s made and take part in the ceremony.
The tea has to be carefully picked from the bushes first. It’s picked twice during year, each time for a different type of tea.

Tea bushes from which we were picking leaves

The filed was not so big, and the path between rows of bushes was very narrow. There was also a lot of tiny bugs flying around, but thankfully they were not biting.

Tea leaves ready for picking

We were going around, trying to find the right kind (it wasn’t easy, believe you me) and when we (finally) found them, we were putting them inside wooden basket. After the “work” was done, we put all the baskets inside a small crate. Each basket had a number, so after the whole trip we were able to take our leaves with us as a nice memento (would be even nicer if it weren’t for the insects living under the leaves...)

That's all that the three of us managed to gather in 20 minutes

After the tea picking we were split into three groups, each of them went to another part of facility. There were three things to see: factory, tea making and tea ceremony (more about each part will be added soon).