Story of Tea in Paris

We visited an exhibition on the history of tea today, at the Guimet Museum in Paris, which is France's national museum of Asian art. This scene is actually outside the exhibition itself, with perhaps two dozen bowls of different tea leaves for us to touch and smell (the large image on the right is part of the scene, on a partition).

Tea has been around for two thousand years, and it's the most widely consumed drink in the world, other than water. The exhibition does it justice--here's a good article describing it. The museum has a very large and high-quality permanent collection of Asian art, which we've never properly seen--we will try to visit again in the course of our stay, and I will report.