Indeed, and no offense taken. I’m often rather botheredthat I have to search for anything “half” decent – which here is broken leaves. Most of it is exposure. I don’t think my countrymen are that dumb, but when you grow up equating tea with tea dust, it takes a bit to adjust to the full leaf thing. Having been raised not only on sweetened tea-dust water, but sweatened store-brand tea-dust water, it never occurred to me until recently that leaves are supposed to be full – “broken” leaves where, I thought, the better quality stuff, and tea dust the norm.
Even my local dim-sum style place (sorta; can’t claim it’s anything like a real dim sum place but it’s between the usual takeout place and the Japanese grills we have here) serves and sells broken tea (though I think their pu-erh might be full).
As for alzheimer’s, I don’t believe anyone in my family has suffered it (we got our curse in the form of myotonic muscular dystrophy) but sometimes I feel it hovering over my shoulder like a grim spectre of the future to come. Or I could just be paranoid.
M.
