Tea ceremony with ice water 2014/08/09
Yesterday I attended the tea ceremony with ice water.
Usually we make tea with hot water. It is great fun to watch steam from a kettle and listen to sounds of boiling water. Moreover we feel refreshed when we take hot tea during hot summer.
However nothing could be more important for tea ceremony than enjoying the sense of seasons. Therefore we have special style tea ceremony just for hot and sticky Japanese summer. It is called ice water tea ceremony.
To fight back against nasty and high humidity, we do our very best to produce the feeling of cool.
We wear dress of silk gauze, water the garden and the narrow street “roji” to the tea room. Then we arrange summer flowers and a refreshing hanging picture.
When you find ice and water in a beautiful blue clear glass pot together with high ice pillar in a wooden basin, you surely feel cool.
Finally we make tea with iced water instead of hot water. It is extremely delicious and comfortable to have cold ice water tea during hot summer.
