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In July, midway through this third year of Global Tea Hut, we find ourselves blossoming like the frangipani flowers outside the center. This is one of the best and most unique months of GTH ever! We hope that all the joy and love that went into this month's envelope will be transmitted to you, and help spread this experience further. In this month, two long-term GTH goals were met with great elation:
Firstly, as we have been discussing in great detail these past few months, we hope to take this magazine further afield, bringing more and more journalism to these pages. This month, we all traveled to Qian Jia Zhai, Ai Lao Mountain in Yunnan. And in the coming pages we plan to tell you all about this magical region, sharing our adventures with you as well. We hope that this trip is the beginning of many more to come, and that future trips are even more focused, with travel articles, info about tea growing regions and families, history, translated texts and much more. As membership increases, we will be able to fund more such trips - bringing you rarer and more exotic teas, and brighter, more interesting stories to surround you tea drinking. We are sure that this will bring an even greater magic to this GTH experience, as well as to connect you to great organic farmers who are committed to environmental preservation.
This trip also heralds the beginning of an annual Global Tea Hut tea trip that we plan to host each spring. Thirteen people joined us this time around, from six different countries around the world. We foresee a time in the future where these annual trips will be much larger, and the camaraderie will be all the more pronounced! Imagine meeting each other for the first time on the slopes of Ai Lao Mountain, as we did. Or sharing your first cup of tea together in person with a GTH brother from Estonia beneath the stunning cliffs of Wuyi Mountain (next year's destination)!
The second goal we achieved this month was to produce our own tea for GTH. As you will soon see, this month's tea is the rarest and most special we've ever sent out in these envelopes, containing all the love and good wishes of thirteen of our very own brothers and sisters in this community! May this be the beginning of many more teas handcrafted with spirit and love - teas that further this community and make this experience all the more intimate.
As promised, we've brought you better packaging to protect the teas, rarer and more personalized tea, and more journalism based on direct connection with tea growing regions, farmers and producers. We hope that this experience helps inspire you to share Global Tea Hut with people. In that way, this experience will expand and we will be able to further improve in all these areas. And, of course, all the proceeds of this magazine will be devoted to maintaining our current center, as well as to building a better, brighter future center that will belong to all of us!
As you travel with us in the following pages, we hope you feel the vibrancy of our trip and the deep and lasting bonds we made with each other - some of us having met for the first time in person. Traveling together brought us all closer together and deepened our love of tea. We hope you feel that too, as if you were there. Actually, you all were. We talked of you often, hoping that the coming issue and the tea sent with it would inspire you as much as it has us. You traveled with us in spirit. And as we begin to travel more to seek out such teas and experiences worth sharing, we know that you'll be along for the ride: in our hearts and prayers. In that way, this experience is much more than a tea of the month club. Plenty of vendors are selling that.
We are offering the chance to connect with a vibrant, living tea tradition and the community that surrounds it! We are offering the chance to learn about tea itself as well as how to utilize tea as a transformational tool in your life. And, most importantly, we are offering you the chance to participate in building free, non-profit tea spaces in Taiwan and later abroad - spaces you can visit yourself and feel a part of. We are offering family...
