#VacationTea
Day number two in Fargo! Not much on the agenda for the day; we stopped at the only tea place in town and hit up a museum – later on in the evening we’ll do supper. We wanted to check out the ‘zoo’ they have here, but sadly it’s closed all of the days we’re here. Tomorrow we’ll check out another museum, and then it’ll be time to head back to Winnipeg.
The museum we looked at was actually pretty cool: they had a giant replica viking ship and chapel – all made as authentically as possible. What I found most neat about the viking ship is that they actually sailed it! The same museum also had some Americana art by local artists, and some very cool wooden die cuts. Those were probably my favourite thing overall. Lastly, there was an exhibit about prohibition and Minnesota/North Dakota’s history with alcohol.
We took tons of pictures ourselves, but I don’t have any of them downloaded yet so here are a couple of the museum that I was able to find with a quick google search:
https://mnprairieroots.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/ship-overall-view.jpg
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/02/d2/e6/0d/heritage-hjemkomst-interpretiv.jpg
The tea shop was pretty neat; the owner was super friendly and engaging – took the time to give us a complete tour of the shop, point out some of his favourite blends, and brewed us up a sample of one of the teas. His shop was largely wellness focused with a lot of different blends intended as health aids, which definitely isn’t my thing in particular but I can see the appeal it has to others and he was clearly very passionate which I think is important.
I did end up getting a good handful of things to try though; largely blends. I thought a fair bit of his offerings were pretty unique/diverse and I liked that he does as much in store as possible (although they did sell A LOT of Republic of Tea product as well). Plus, he sold in one ounce sizes, which definitely was a big bonus for me! Perhaps the most surprising this was that they actually carried a selection of Pu’erh from Misty Peak. He didn’t seem to know much about them though, other than which were Sheng/Shou. Apparently Misty Peak had approached him in regard to carrying their teas.
I was tempted to buy some of the loose sheng – Misty Peak’s reputation aside. It actually smelled pretty damn good. It wasn’t worth blind buying it though; if I’m going for a straight pu’erh I want to know as much information about it as possible. Besides. I know Misty Peaks has an online store, so if I really want I can always order from them directly. It was just kind of interesting/surprising seeing their teas in this small, out of the way shop in Fargo.
This tea was ok – it was the one that he brewed up for me and my Dad. I looked for it on their website, but it’s not listed so it must be a new blend. I remember him saying that it used a Wuyi oolong for the base though, and it definitely had hibiscus in it as well – I could visually pick it out in the dry leaf, and it was pretty present in the taste too. The roastier oolong paired with hibiscus was… different. I didn’t hate it, but it was a little weird. It also didn’t really taste at all like plum, sadly. Mostly, it was just a slightly sour/tart generic berry kind of profile. Maybe a little raisin too. I’m grateful we got to try it, but it wasn’t interesting enough for me to feel like I wanted to buy it.
