Tea done right

So beeg seester thinks she likes Japanese green tea. That's not meaning green tea grown in Japan, but the powdered green tea (抹茶 - matcha) unique to Japanese tea ceremonies. She doesn't say if it's the stong (濃茶 - koicha) sort of the actual ceremony or the weak stuff (薄茶 - usucha) served at the end, she may not have read that far on whatever web page of Japanese tea ceremony she was looking at. It takes 2 to 4 times as much to make koicha and you use better grade powder -- not that you use different amounts for koicha, actually it's usucha that changes.

The minimum equipment needed to drink the tea (not have a ceremony of any sort) would be tea bowl (茶碗 - chawan), whisk (茶筅 - chasen), and matcha. There's a few very cheap items of these out there, but not a lot because to make the tea right you have to use good equipment. If I look around here, though, there may be some interesting solutions that don't break the budget. Keeping in mind that it should be done right or not at all. An interesting problem which could have some nice stores to visit like futon store (that had much more than traditional futons) I was in last week.

Yikes... fresh cedar chopsticks, it says. I've been using a pair of ceder chopsticks for a few years now and it took many months for the cedar smell to fade. Until it had, the food always tasted a bit of cedar. Oh, did you figure out how to say and write tea?