This coming Saturday Phoenix Tea Shop will be sponsoring a loosely Russian-themed tea house at the annual Arts-A-Glow lantern festival in Burien Washington. There will be a lovely coal samovar in the tea house, but it won’t be employed in our tea service, at least not this year, and we’ll be serving the tea in compostable cups, not Lomonosov porcelain or antique Podstakanniki. The tea service will be more functional than fancy since we could potentially see more than a thousand attendees if the festival is as well-attended as it was last year. And we certainly hope that many of the attendees will want to come by our tent for a free cup of tea.
There will be Qimen, Jasmine Green and Rooibos/Honeybush, as well as some lemonade for the kids. There’s also going to be some Yunnan Hong Cha on hand in case we feel the need to change things up a little. Grand Central Bakery, which opened its Burien location last month, is providing bread and jam to accompany the tea.
We are also sponsoring the appearance of Ann Wendell, a local writer and historian who will be reading tea leaves during the event. If you’ve ever had the inclination to see tasseography in action, come by her table so she can tell you what the leaves reveal about you and your future.
And…when I was a child I lived across the street from a woman who used to be in the carney and she taught me to read tea leaves…there’s a psychic streak that runs through the women in my family (my sister is an astrologer and we both worked as phone psychics for awhile)…I used to read the leaves a lot but haven’t too much lately…then I ended up reading leaves at the NW Tea Festival for Steve Baker to support his Three Tea Tour and had a blast so now (in my spare time hahaha) I’m trying to do more of that.
– excerpted from her 2008 post entitled, “Career Planning through Chaos Theory”
We’re going to be there for the duration of the festival, from 5:00pm until 10:00pm, serving free tea, and chatting with people about the tea shop.
You can find more about this event on the City of Burien website, or the Arts-A-Glow Facebook page.