chai [tea]

Once upon a time, I went to a tea plantation as part of my Environmental Management class! (This was back in Uganda, which seems like ages ago... An entire month ago!)

Everywhere you look, there were endless fields of tea.

I drink so much tea at home, but I've never really thought about what goes into the process of making tea. How do these vast expanses of tea plants magically end up in my kitchen cabinet, packaged all nice and neat in little single-serving bags?  I had no idea until this day!

Here I am ready to go in my lab coat!  Inspectors Maria and Alan, all suited up and ready to explore the inner workings of a tea factory.

Inside the factory, there were so many different conveyor belts.  The tea leaves go through multiple stages of sorting, weighing, wilting, and drying.  I believe the following picture is of the first stage, when the tea leaves are initially being sorted (unwanted things like sticks and bugs are removed, and then piles of tea leaves are put into these moving buckets for some mysterious reason).

Then it's on to weighing, wilting, more sorting, drying, more weighing, more drying, more sorting...Eventually, you end up with these buckets of nice black tea!

And here's the tea all packaged up and ready for export:

The factory even had a tasting room to taste for quality.  Unfortunately I didn't get to test any, but I did buy half a kilo of tea (for barely a dollar!! Love cutting out the middle man!), so hopefully I got a good batch!

At the end of the day, we had to return our lab coats.  Here's our group leaving through the tea plantation.

Uganda was so long ago.  We're now on the last leg of the field studies program -- Zanzibar!  Only 6 more days!  Time is really flying.