Lyon Japanese Tea Seminar – 8th October, 2013

Two weeks in Europe went by without noticing. Many new places, many interesting people and here we are in Lyon – the capital of French food, for our last day. While food in Lyon is fantastic, our choice to have an event there was for a different reason – it is the city, where our beloved previous intern Angie is from.

Angie helped us organizing a tea seminar at the Lyon University and her professor Julien Bouvard spread the news about the event to the students. Interesting enough is that the 3^rd university of Lyon is based in a previous Tabaco factory and there is still a lot of evidence of that.

What we could not expect is that more than 100 students would show up at the event. Most of them were on a Japanese course. We were surprised, is Japanese culture really that popular? This time we did run out of cups and had to use plastic ones, but students did still like the tea that we were serving and were not shy to ask for more. Mori-san again lent us a hand in explaining the history of tea and making matcha for the students.

Lyon was our final event and as we still had a bit of tea left Matsu-san decided to hand it out to students. Someone might think of it as an expensive advertising, but for us it is a way to inspire and connect to the younger generation. It was our first visit in Lyon and the warm welcome tells us we would have place we can return to if Obubu was to come back to Europe next year.