After a long time, I’m easing back into tea blogging with a review of this simple but delicious tea. If you drink Japanese tea, you’re probably familiar with houjicha, the roasted green tea that was originally created to minimise waste (you can even turn any stale sencha you have lying around into houjicha – that’s… Read More Tea Review: Bouhoujicha from Ohnishien
I first heard about Dr Gwen Adshead when she was the lecturer for the BBC’s Reith Lectures. Her four talks on the problem of violence were so insightful that after I immediately put a reservation for a copy of her book: The Devil You Know. For me, the book and the talks complemented each other.… Read More Book Review: The Devil You Know by Gwen Adshead
Recently, Krysta from Pages Unbound posted about whether it’s worth starting a book blog in 2025 and her points about community and freedom from the algorithm were two that resonated with me. As you know, I’ve been pretty much off social media and blogging, but over the many years I’ve been on the internet, I’ve… Read More Thoughts on Blogging, Instagram, Lemon8, Substack, and all that
A few years back, while I was working in a tea and tech-based startup, I went for a Japanese food fair. There, I heard about Sayama tea for the first time, and as someone who was already interested in Japanese tea, I took the chance to talk to Kajishima-san, the lady who was running the… Read More My Visit to Sayama ‘Teas’neyland
Hello friends! As you know, I’ve been tired lately, and I even talked about how I think I’ve piled too much on my plate. This is a bit of a recurrent topic for me, so I’ve been doing some reading on what I can do about it, and today I want to share five book… Read More Five Books That are Helping Me Slow Down and Refocus
Hello friends! I have not dared to check when was the last time I talked about podcast but… it was definitely a long time ago. And I do have some podcasts that I would like to share, and also to help myself record what went on in the podcast app this year. So without further… Read More A 2024 Podcast Update
I loved Hanna Alkaf’s debut novel, The Weight of Our Sky, and really liked her other novel The Girl and the Ghost, so I was definitely interested in reading more from her. Queen of the Tiles is different from her previous historical novels as it’s a contemporary YA story about grief, disguised as a murder… Read More Book Review: Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf
After reading River Town, I decided to move on to another book about China – this one about the “return of religion after Mao” (according to the book’s subtitle). One thing I noticed in River Town was that while people didn’t like to criticise Mao Zedong overtly, they were rather willing to admit that he… Read More Book Review: The Souls of China by Ian Johnson
I had a business trip to Suzhou and Shanghai and was too ambitious about how much reading time I had, which is why I started River Town in China but finished it in Singapore. River Town is a memoir of Hessler’s two years in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze river. Hessler was there… Read More Book Review: River Town by Peter Hessler
I posted earlier about the tea I had at Giverny cafe in Nagasaki. Well, as I was leaving, I realised that they were selling Mlesna Tea so… I bought three (which already shows a lot of self-control on my end). These three teas were technically already in the previous post, but I’ve been sharing them… Read More 3 Mlesna Tea Reviews
