Before Obubu, I had been unemployed for most of the year. I work in animation for the past 5 years as a background designer, color designer, and visual development artist. My industry has unfortunately gone through a dry spell due to a myriad of reasons and I had found myself with no work for the past 7+ months. Being unemployed is quite difficult and painful. I found myself trying to find new things to apply to and rewriting and redrafting my resume and cover letters for each kind of job.
For the past year or so, I had been driving down to Irvine from Burbank every Tuesday to watch a movie in theaters with my friend Mariah Wilson (Intern #209) and a handful of her friends. She would craft a little menu and ask us to pick a specialty tea drink she had crafted. As time went on, she got better and better and I found myself starting to become interested and wanted to make my own drinks to rival hers. Before I knew we really started to work on her brand and started doing parties and little pop ups.
And making drinks just became something that brought me a lot of peace and joy and when she told me she was applying to the Obubu internship program, I thought why not? And decided to apply as well.
Actually my submission was a bit late. I missed the deadline by a day because I misunderstood that I was supposed to apply in JST. I ended up sending a follow up email asking if they would reconsider. I persisted and they ended up allowing me to send in a video and I had only one short day to put everything together. I was so ecstatic when I got chosen and just a few months later I found myself on a plane to Japan with one of my very best friends.
Obubu has been such an incredible experience in so many ways. I’ve learned so much about Japanese tea and truly have come to love so many different types of tea that I’ve never tried before. I don’t think I had ever even had sencha before coming here along with a myriad of other teas like kuikicha, wakocha, and kyobancha. I truly was just an aka-Chan when it came to my understand of tea. I’ve learned so much here and I’ve truly fallen in love with all the interns, assistant managers, and staff. They all mean a lot more to me than I ever really expected and I feel so blessed to have had this opportunity to know them.
