tea snobbery

The thing about New York that is going to haunt me (although it started in Rwanda, so maybe New York can't be blamed completely) is that it has made me a tea snob. Like I said, this started in Rwanda, where they grow the tea right there and package it into green boxes and blue boxes and yellow boxes. And then the boxes are oh-so-inexpensive and the tea in them is excellent. Very excellent. I grew up on herbal tea, but I became addicted to tea (plain old black tea, sometimes boiled with some ginger and tea masala) in Rwanda.

Now I live in New York (veeeery reluctantly; I should have done a lot more looking at law schools in other places instead of blindly applying based on the PROGRAMS schools offer, silly me). There are many whines I could whine about New York and how much I hate living here and how it has made even the thought of the suburbs (horror of horrors) seem lovely and sane by comparison, but there is some good tea here. There is a lot of good tea here, actually. And I think it's going to be a problem. People, I can now tell the difference between various black teas. I can tell you which one I am in the mood for on any given day. This is a looming, lurking problem. A person who can say, "I'm not in an Assam Meleng mood today. I feel more like a Milima." is not going to be able to slip calmly back into drinking Lipton, the yuckkiest of yuck teas. I am going to have to mail-order good tea when I move away from here. And furthermore, I'm going to have to get a tea-sspresso maker and keep whole milk in the house and...