Let’s address the elephant in the room: tea is dull, right?
As a hustling university student, my beverage of choice is a caffeinated latte. Large. Extra espresso, please. Something hefty to power through 10-hour long study days, 100 open Chrome tabs and weekly career crises.
But this past May, in a homey hostel in the quaint town of Oświęcim, Poland, I discovered the joy of a simple cup of tea. Captivated by the rainbow of flavours — raspberry, strawberry, even pineapple — my daily cup of tea was my lifeline in the early days of my Go Global seminar.
Because the universe seizes every opportunity to crush students’ souls, I fell sick the night before my flight to Europe. Around the 6 hour mark of the 9-hour flight, I found myself crouched on the bathroom floor, feeling nauseous but unable to throw up, regretting the life choices that led to me hugging my knees and rocking back and forth in a closet-sized bathroom in a metal tube 30,000 feet in the air.
Upon arrival in Poland, I trudged up the wooden stairs of our seminar group’s hostel, delirious from pathogenic attacks in the forms of a sore throat, runny nose, headache and fever. I collapsed on the twin bed and dreaded the next day’s 8 a.m. start.
Through bleary morning eyes, I discovered a gold mine in the downstairs breakfast nook: boxes and boxes of unique teas! I gravitated towards them instantly. I gingerly bobbed a tea bag in the hot water, watched the colour diffuse slowly and tried to sniff my cold away. There, between the cramped circular tables, the porcelain tea cup perfectly snug in my hands and the steam soothing my throat, I felt a little bit more prepared to dive into the academic seminar.
From then on, as I recovered, my days were anchored by cups of tea. Green tea in the mornings to match the breakfast nook's sage green walls before our 40-minute walk to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. A cup of pomegranate tea (which tasted like a weird middle ground between sweet and bitter?) beside my notebook and pen for our 8 p.m. seminar discussions. A week in, I giddily tried the exotic pineapple tea (I highly recommend) as I completed the next day’s readings in bed by lamplight.
“I’m now a tea person,” I declared on a call with my friend.
“That’ll last a week, max,” he said.
Tea was truly a blessing. On days when I blew my nose so often that the skin around my nostrils was perpetually flaky and I squeezed in five-minute naps in the museum lunchroom, those few seconds of gulping down warm tea was my only source of relief. In a seminar where every day I learned about the cruelty of Nazi death camps and walked the very grounds where over a million prisoners perished, the routine of crafting a cup of tea and listening to the soft gurgling of the kettle allowed me to take a breather.
It became part of my identity, something to cling to while I was still figuring out a rhythm with my classmates. Tea bookended the jam-packed days when I was on the cusp of my twenties and convinced my future was bleak and directionless. Cup of tea in hand, I stood on the balcony of our hostel on a quiet Sunday afternoon. I gazed out at the town square, partly lit by the sun. I was a young university student halfway across the world in a foreign country, neck-deep in an intensive academic seminar that, though fascinating, had nothing to do with my degree. I shuddered at the thought of starting third year in September, with no glimmer of a stable, secure career in sight, broke and losing a battle against a goddamn sore throat.
But each sip of the fruity tea coaxed my tastebuds back to life. By the time our group departed for the second leg of our seminar in Kraków, my nose cleared up and I could laugh without feeling pain in my throat. I left the teabags behind in our Oświęcim hostel, tucked in boxes lined up one after another in the breakfast nook.
In Vancouver, back in the throes of midterm season and pitch-black evenings, I traded pineapple tea for Blue Chip lattes. Hugging my backpack while commuting to campus, I listened to the mechanical rattling of the R4 instead of soft jazz floating through Oświęcim’s picturesque streets. I’m far from that balcony, but still questioning if I’m going in the right direction.
But sometimes, when I lay awake at night, I remember it’s morning in Poland and wonder if the raspberry tea is restocked. I’m still unpacking what I learned in that hostel. I was sick and exhausted, but through my daily cup of tea, I played the part of somebody who had their life together.
Maybe one day I’ll be that person — the kind whose days begin with strolls through the quaint, timeless streets of Oświęcim. The kind of person whose beverage of choice is a cup of tea.
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