Latvia (but mostly everywhere, habibi)
BEFORE OBUBU
Well.. Before Obubu, there was also… Obubu! I was an intern #138 during the Autumn harvest season in 2022, I spent a bit of time of time with Nagasaki Ikedoki Tea in Higashi Sonogi with Marjolein and Matsu-san in summer 2023, followed by being a volunteer for about a week at Obubu during the sencha factory event space renovation, and then finally came back as an Assistant Manager in autumn 2024, which was my third autumn in a row here. Now, as I am writing this, it is my 4th.
What about before that? Well, my tea story began over 10 years ago now, way before Obubu, and there are too many tangents and side quests in between countless of tea adventures to count, some of them are perhaps a bit mystical even. Since then, tea has been the central element in my life, may it be during the high school studies pursuing and dreaming of an audio engineering career, playing in underground rock bands, working in a bohemian Chinese style tea room in Latvia after school, or during the university degree in Scotland studying Music, Religion & World Cultures while managing a Czech-style Tchaiovna tea house filled with gypsy jazz live music, daily martial arts classes upstairs, and performing a fire dancing show or two in the dark of the night tea or even setting myself on fire by accident (to pay rent haha). During the pandemic, living in the oldest church in the Old Town of Riga in Latvia and serving tea for friends on tranquil mornings in the medieval atmosphere, soundscape filled with the Sunday morning bells. Or the eight months, living in the Western Sahara Desert and sipping fire-boiled tea Zarda with the local Siwan Amazigh peoples around a fire in the endless sea of dunes, tour guiding and driving on motorbikes and tuktuks around the salt lakes and date palm and olive tree gardens, were followed by living the life of a tea farmer here in Wazuka for three months during the beautiful momiji-painted autumn (yep, I applied for the internship directly from the Sahara Desert). After the internship it spiralled into traversing the ancient tea forests of wild Vietnam, the tea jungles of Thailand, high tea mountains and old tea houses of Taiwan, royal tea gardens and temples of South Korea (yes, working with the Royal family, brewing tea at royal tomb rituals for late princes and making tea with Buddhist nuns is also part of the story), the massive CTC factories and estates of Bangladesh, tea association and collective offices in Kathmandu in Nepal while falling off motorbikes for sport, and upon my return to Latvia, brewing tea on ice floes reminiscent of the Antarctic. The journey was quite something, and continues to be so. Tea truly takes you to magical places and lets you meet wonderful and special people of various backgrounds in ways that you might not expect. Even in my wildest dreams I could not have dreamt all of this. Thank you, Camellia sinensis leaf for being a North Star.
DURING OBUBU
Many things happen… You might have read this countless of times on our pages, and start to wonder where is the t-shirt design for this motto. The year passed so fast, in a blink of an eye. Every month, every week and day is filled with so many enriching experiences, it sometimes is hard to keep track of everything that is going on. You get to learn, grow and transform so fast that sometimes there is no time to look back and you just keep going with the dance that it is.
Photo by intern George (thank you for so many beautiful farming and factory photos!).
And, most importantly! The friendships you get to forge here! When I was an intern, my co-interns became like a dear family, and now as an assistant manager, I got to witness 7 groups of interns, i.e., 35 incredible souls, coming for this unforgettable Japanese countryside ride. It is a rewarding feeling, and yet bonding for 3 months and then saying the bittersweet goodbyes always happened to be a rollercoaster of emotions. Working here as an AM also allowed us to work more closely with the staff members and it has been truly enlightening to get to learn from them up close. Farming and processing with Akky-san and Miwako-san, wholesale and shipping with George and Kayo-san, tea tour magic with Hiro-san, all things tea education with Pau (and the saponin bro shenanigans, of course), and so much more. The way staff regularly teaches us and trusts us with daily activities of organising tours and farming missions, as well as guiding and teaching interns – I truly keep learning about teamwork here everyday, which I find so beautiful. However, if someone asked what was my favourite activity during the program, I would have to say with zero hesitation – farming and processing. Even in the hottest and most humid of days, I was beyond excited to go to the tea fields and get my hands dirty and break a sweat.
As assistant managers, we have leadership areas and support positions, therefore, some of the ones I got to work on were scheduling intern calendars (yes, the hardcore tetris game on the Google Calendar), social media management, newsletter writing, intern project and blog coordination, ambassador program, education, video asset management, assistant manager selection, as well as time to time support other roles such as intern selection, tea tourism, accommodation management, product support, etc. We have roles where we are the leaders, but in reality AMs get to do a bit of everything as we work closely with each other as a team, and I have deep gratitude for my senpai Alix and Mac, as well as kouhai Nicole, Mia, Marilena, and Tran for being such an excellent team throughout the year. I learned so much from you all!
Apart from day to day work routines, what was I up to? Probably way too many things to count… (as usual) Learning temomicha (hand-rolled sencha), some senchado lessons with Nakai-sensei, staying up all night in the sencha factory with Akky-san during the spring harvest, weekend mountain shenanigans, as well as some travel there and there. And driving school lol.
During the AM program, just like interns, we have personal projects. One of my goals this year was to refine my content creation skills, in particular video making as I had this dream since I was a little kiddo to make some rare, wild tea terroir and culture documentaries (well, when I was a kid, I didn’t know about tea much, so I envisioned movies about wilderness). And since I really wanted to continue learning more about farming and processing, as well as develop skills in handrolled sencha, I started making a short film about temomicha. Pau, Miwako-san, Akky-san, Alix and myself went to the Uji Tea Hand-rolling competition in March, so there is some really interesting footage brewing (sorry, still in progress)!
Sneak peek into the temomi movie.
As an intern, I did tea of the month with Hiro-san (Natural Black Gyokuro), so now it was time to film Miwako-san with Natural Sencha (this year was so busy that it became tea of the year lol)! It was also a good Japanese language practice to translate the script to put subtitles, too. Hence, several goals with one stone!
Kickstarter! During autumn and winter time, we also had our second Kickstarter, which was dedicated to the shuttle bus connection between Wazuka and Kyoto and Kizu Stations, connecting our beautiful inaka to the wider world, fuelling the greater mission of revitalising Wazuka that is struggling with ageing population and younger generations leaving the tea village. I was lucky to collaborate on this with George, Miwako-san and former intern Sara Hagstrom, who made the incredible bus design. My job primarily consisted of the campaign’s social media promotion, regular page updates and maintenance, newsletter, and finally helping with the reward fulfilment and shipping. It was a definitely a very much collaborative team effort (as most things are here at Obubu), so I hope it is okay to throw it into the box of my “this year’s projects”.
Photo by George.
Countryside Walking Tour! Another collab project, which is still in progress. Since Hiro-san is also an avid hiker and yearly goes to ascend Mt. Fuji, he had a brilliant idea of hosting Countryside Walking Tours. The first one was a 14 km walk around Wazuka, brewing tea outside and soaking in the culture, history and tea of this beautiful village. We are excited to conduct more of these in the future, so stay tuned!
Drone Footage of All Tea Fields. Among a few other small side quests and projects, thanks to George’s drone refresher lesson and Miwako-san’s idea about taking drone photos of all our tea fields in order to make farming task planning easier. Since I had an obsession about going to tea fields during my spare time, it felt like a productive way how to go there with purpose and not just loafing around. And thanks to Milan’s project of making a stamp book for interns with Obubu tea field stickers (similar like goshuinchou or the train station stamps in Japan), I got to realise this significantly faster since we went on several tea field photo hunting escapades to take photos of all the tea fields together. Hence, the tea farming and processing planning notebook is still in progress, but at least the weekend getaways with the drone was still definitely something that I spent plenty time on, which was a worthwhile learning experience.
Tea in mountains! When not in the tea fields of Wazuka, I took them to some Japanese summits! One of the very first project ideas I had was “Tea and Mountain Pairing,” inspired by Alix’s Cheese and Tea Pairings. As in, which Obubu tea should you bring to which summit? But since doing the Hyakumeizan (100 Famous Japanese Mountains) would probablyyyy take more than a year, I had to hold my horses a bit (or wild boars, perhaps). However, I think in the future, I would still very much love to create a short guide about how to brew tea in the great outdoors and perhaps a small photo collection of “Tea in Mountains.” I also have some mountain photography exhibitions with tea brewing in my crazy, relentless brain. Inshallah.
AFTER OBUBU
It is quite surreal to write this since it is my second time writing the “previous …” page and printing out yet another photo for the “wall of fame”, and as I started the page with “Before Obubu, there was Obubu,” in the “after” section I am also going to write: Obubu. I am humbled to stay as a staff member after my Assistant Manager graduation, so you will see more of me here in Wazuka. To even my surprise, it looks like the vagabonding tea wildling will be a bit more settled for the foreseeable future, and Obubu being the base is the biggest gift the destiny might have prepared as the ride is shared with the most amazing team one could wish for.
In the previous intern page I wrote that after Obubu maybe I will be living with honey badgers in the savannah drinking sencha or journeying along the Ancient Tea Horse Road in a donkey caravan across Himalayas (maybe Silk Road?) because, hey, life is advenCHA(茶). And while that was somewhat true already after the internship, I have a feeling that some of it is still there on the horizon in one form or another, but as a side quest during the off seasons, as the main quest is here in Wazuka.
Thank you for all the beautiful memories until now, I look forward to making and sharing plenty of cups of tea with all of you! よろしくお願いします！
Projects & Blogs
2024-2025 (Assistant Manager):
2022 (Internship):