First full day

By 11:00 AM yesterday, I had definitely had enough new experiences that I was in theory ready to head home and call it a day. There were still eight solid hours of time to be spent at the Tea school though, so I couldn't begin to reconstruct my day in a meaningful or comprehensive way this morning.

I first arrived at the school on Tuesday. On Thursday, some of the students of the program I am visiting are hosting a chaji.

According to http://wiki.chado.no/Chaji, a chaji is "a tea gathering during which the host serves food and sake in addition to Koicha and Usucha. A chaji takes several hours to complete." Koicha is a thick, syrupy green tea, and usucha is the less formal, more famous whisked green of Tea ceremony.


The day that I arrived, there was a change in the normal schedule. Instead of regularly planned lectures in the morning, we took a "field trip" to Toinseki, a tea house that I believe is attached to the grounds of a Buddhist temple. This is where the chaji will take place on Thursday. 


Just typing "Toinseki" into Google provided me with the blogs of a number of Westerners who have attended this Tea school, so here are some pictures of the teahouse that somebody took.


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After a walk-through and an explanation of what everyone will do tomorrow (I'm on kitchen duty), we returned to the school for lunch and afternoon Tea practice. I was placed with the kohai group - the students who began studying here in April rather than last September. They were performing a particular style of thick Tea, wherein the tea is kept in a thin tea container that is tied up in a special silk pouch. Then at the end of the lesson, we all played a Tea game called ha-getsu (flower-moon) in which we went through a Tea session with frequent stops to draw lots and determine who was going to take charge of the next part of the program.


After this was dinner, followed by evening cleaning. Everyone else then left to prepare for aspects of Thursday's chaji, and I headed out to purchase some necessities and groceries. 


I hope that the jetlag keeps up for a while, because early-to-bed, early-to-rise seems like the only way to make this program work. Whew! And I'm just a short-term visitor with comparatively light expectations.


Today, it's lectures in the morning and an afternoon of cleaning up the tea house and the surrounding gardens. Tomorrow, it's the chaji. Friday, I get to find out what a "normal day" looks like.