Pine needle tea makers

We stayed overnight at a Zen Buddhist temple...and had a hands-on experience of making green tea - all the way from picking the leaves, drying in a giant wok and eventually preparing for brewing. What a huge job!

While we dabbled away at our relatively small harvest, these women were joyfully separating pine needles from huge branches (singing and telling stories all the while) and then cooking them down into a syrupy concoction in enormous vats.