Tea All Around Me!

Hello! And welcome back to another one of my blogs! Today I am going to talk about one of the places I visited in Bangladesh when I was a kid, and that was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. 

This was back in December 2009. I was an 8-year-old kid without exposure to the world outside the city since we rarely went on family trips. So, that was the first time I went outside the city. I did go to other places in Bangladesh before that, but I was too little to remember anything, so I don’t like to count it as going outside the city. Anyway, we went to a district called Sylhet in Bangladesh. They speak a different dialect there, so I felt like I was in a foreign country. 

We visited many beautiful places in Sylhet, but there was this one particular place that I found pretty interesting. It’s called the tea garden. The place is quite renowned in Bangladesh, and being able to see it in person felt great. The first thing I noticed after entering the area was the aroma of tea all around the place. It smelled like tea everywhere, but they were actually coming from the leaves. And what I found the most fascinating was that it did not seem like those trees were used to produce tea. And until then, I was only familiar with processed tea leaves which looked like powder to me. So being able to learn how they are prepared and what they look like unprocessed was interesting. 

A picture of me at the Tea Garden.

After the tea garden, we went to this cafe famous for serving seven layers of tea, which is called “shaat ronger cha” in Bengali. At the time, it was pretty famous until later, after a few years, people figured out how to make it at home and how easy it was to make. Anyway, I remember it was during sunset the next day; we were passing by a really big field. I asked my Dad to pull over the car because I wanted to go there. That field was the highlight of my trip to Sylhet. As a kid raised in the city, I had never seen such a huge grass field before. And to make things better, there were cows grazing in the field, and my Dad took a bunch of pictures of me with the cows. 

A picture of me with a calf in the field.

Both of these memories are big parts of my fascination for nature. I wish I could go to that time again and relive those days, but I feel like through the pictures, my Dad took of me in that field, I can go there whenever I like. Therefore, I am glad I went on a trip to Sylhet that winter with my family. We did go on several trips after that, but that vacation was special to me. Perhaps it was after that trip that I became a keen admirer of nature and started paying more attention to it. If any of you reading this blog ever visit Bangladesh, I highly recommend visiting Sylhet.

Quick video on how tea is made.