Sunday, March 31, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
2nd Annual San Francisco International Tea Festival
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Afternoon Tea Across America members meet up! Photo: Elizabeth Urbach |
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Mr. Fong and Mr. Pratt opening the 2012 Festival. Photo: Elizabeth Urbach |
My friend and I went to the The San Francisco International Tea Festival at the Ferry Building Marketplace last Sunday. A big highlight for me was meeting up with some of the members of the Afternoon Tea Across America e-mail group on Yahoo (see photo at left)! We had a good time, and will probably go again next year. The festival, open to tea lovers outside the professional tea trade, involved 16 tea vendors and various experts who offered samples of their tea and tea products, gave lectures and led tea tastings. There were about 1,000 attendees, who received a small bag of promotional handouts, a few samples of tea, and an official tasting cup, at the festival entrance.
Labels:
author,
black tea,
books,
California,
chai,
chocolate,
education,
event,
festival,
International Tea Festival,
lavender,
oolong tea,
pu-erh,
San Francisco,
South Bay Ladies' Tea Guild,
tasting,
tea tasting,
white tea
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Mrs. Burnett's dress, part 2.
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Harriet Burnett's dress, ca. 1849 Photo: Elizabeth Urbach |
There was no further description or mention of the event itself, although an interview with someone who was there, done many years later, and published in 1941, has the woman recalling that the ball was "the" event for the Bay Area for years afterwards. I think the only place where I could find a fuller description of the ball, would be in the letters or journal of someone (a woman) who was there, but I don't know of any journals or letters from 1849 in San Jose that have been published, or are available to the public! I think I'm at a dead end in verifying the provenance of the dress, so I've just made a record for it in the museum database, saying that the dress "is said to have been worn" at the Inauguration Ball. I'll have to leave it at that for now. It's been really fun reading all those old newspapers, though. I found a website, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, that has scanned the papers into digital form and made them readable (you can enlarge the printing from the teeny-tiny original size!).
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Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
"The Winter Evening" (Book Four), _The Task_ (1784)
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
"The Winter Evening" (Book Four), _The Task_ (1784)