tiny tea scare

i've a confession to make. i hardly drink plain water but have somehow picked up the bad habit of drinking copious amounts of tea (almost never coffee!). recently, i  read an article about how most tea leaves aren't properly washed. the resulting levels of pesticides and carcinogens (ugh!) are therefore much higher than the safe limits. with plastic teabags leeching disgusting chemicals into the hot water, and paper teabags bleached with more scary chemicals yet, even teabags aren't spared! how reliable the article was is beyond me, but surely there must be a grain of truth. the take home message being: drink organic, loose leaf tea from a stainless steel / glass tea strainer. 

now i'm not about to go all militant and stop downing my beloved twining's lemon&ginger tea all together but i'm also wary of all the bad stuff in my otherwise innocent looking cuppa. i'm caffeine-tolerant (good or bad, you tell me!) and the only thing that keeps me going is abject fear and desperation i.e. i can forget pulling a crazy caffeine-driven all-nighter (yay me when i'm shadowing on calls next month :/) but i can also enjoy strong coffee as a nightcap without the mister fearing for his sanity. along the same vein (sorry, i've venepuncture and cannulation on my mind) as the previous post, growing up strikes me as the inclination "to have less but better" - be it food and drink, shopping or even friends (haha). in some ways, spending our "wine budget" on the same number of half bottles may seem extravagant, but if i'm going to stop at two glasses, they better be good glasses! 

lengthy pre-amble aside, after this new-found appreciation for organic tea, you can imagine how happy i was to stumble on this lovely little tea shop. its floor to ceiling windows let plenty of natural light in while preserving the original structure and period charm. they also have the yummiest loose leaf lemongrass tea that brings me right back to ecuador when i was drinking tea straight from the on-site herb garden.

and there's my mister with his nose buried in fashion. it's semi-scary how well-versed he's become, with this crazy ability to tell fabric components from a mere touch.