I asked my parents for tea for my birthday, and yesterday a package arrived in the mail from Fukushima, Japan.

Iris is a born aesthete. Sure, she can be impressed by gaudy princess gear, but I have never, ever seen her more excited about a package than this one, which is odd, since (a) it was not for her, and (b) she doesn’t like tea.

The package, from [o-cha.com](http://www.o-cha.com/), contained a packet of tea (printed with Japanese calligraphy and a color drawing of growing tea leaves), a washi paper tea canister, and a polished cherrywood teaspoon. Iris was especially blown away by the canister, which looks like this:

You can order your own, but it won’t look like ours. They’re all different.

As for the tea, it’s fukamushi sencha, probably the greenest and strongest of all Japanese teas. I love it. “It’s like spinach tea,” said my mom, and she’s right. If you don’t already love green tea, this is not the place to start. It would be like going out to sushi for the first time and ordering a bunch of uni. You can probably tell when someone is opening the canister in the other room.

O-Cha’s stuff is not cheap, but everything they sell is high quality, and this box only took four days to arrive from Japan.

Iris is going to be waking up in a few minutes, and I’m sure she will ask to open the washi canister. Based on this experience, I predict that when we actually go to Japan, Iris’s head is going to explode.