Friday, July 27, 2012

Up in the air I go flying again

Here is the fourth installment of photographs from my trip with the children, this time from Särkänniemi amusement park in Tampere. We spent six hours there, and even though it rained a bit every now and then, the weather was just right, not too hot or too cold.

Many other people had come to the park. Both of the big parking lots were full of cars, but luckily we found a space in a hidden corner of the parking lot farthest away. And there were long queues in the park, although later during the evening it was better as people started leaving.

Six hours in the park made me rather tired, but the children seemed to have surprising reserves of energy. But it wasn't difficult to get the children to sleep that night, after a enjoyable day.

One of the things I discovered during the trip was how difficult it is to find good tea in restaurants or cafes. When there was brewed tea available, it was so dark that you couldn't visually distinguish it from coffee, and the taste was awful, one would have needed to put a lot of sugar and milk in it to make it tolerable, and I don't put either in tea.

And if there was hot water available for tea, then the type of green tea bags which were available were those to which an additional flavor has been applied, so that it is impossible to taste the tea, you only taste the added flavor.

So, even though my tea brewing experiments have sometimes given awful results (because of using too hot water), I was very pleased to come back home and brew a cup of tea for myself. Or several cups.

Currently I'm drinking Temple of Heaven gunpowder tea. This particular tea is quite mild, but I like the taste a lot, and even though the recommended brewing temperature is 70 °C, it seems to tolerate hotter water as well. (I'm sometimes too impatient to cool the boiling water.)

(Posting title is from the poem The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson.)

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