Tea Travel(ers)
Hi All!
Just had a chat with the lovely Raritea, and (among other things) we spoke of wanting a way to connect with other Steepster-ites while traveling, working or studying abroad, etc.
While I realize we can (sort of) search by location, it just doesn’t work well at this point. I’m talking to my programmer to see if there’s a sort of “dating site” type of script we can create for tea lovers, to connect for tea adventures… in the meantime, I’d love to know: how do you find other tea lovers when traveling?
(note: I may create a FB group for this purpose, but I feel like there has to be another, easier way).
Example: I’m in Jasper (Canada) right now, on to Edinburgh (Scotland) shortly, then Cape Town (South Africa) next. I know no one in these areas (while I’m there), and would love to go tea shopping, tasting, or exploring with others.
Are you making Teander a real thing because I am always down to steep together on the first date.
My hubs, who works with programmers and has messed around with programming back in the Stone Age before apps, actually mentioned doing something like this about a month ago. I told him it sounded silly, but seeing it applied to travel it makes perfect sense.
I encourage the people I meet on my travels to go out for a good cup of loose-leaf tea. They are usually intrigued by all the different facets of tea and are happy to ask me questions to learn more. Last year, I organized a guided tea-tasting with some of the girls from my class. They really enjoyed it and are definitely more into tea because of it! I’m always on the lookout for good quality tea shops and they sometimes will offer tasting clubs. Some kind of app to connect tea lovers would be great! It would be nice to have an option to connect with someone on a one-on-one basis rather than go to a big meetup with lots of people which I can sometimes find overwhelming.
That would be pretty awesome. Once upon a time we did some steepster meetups in NYC and that was pretty fun. Other than that, I only hang out with tea people IRL if we’ve talked a lot online. My city upbringing has me very skeptical of strangers.
It does sound like an interesting idea, with the obvious limitations, about giving access to personal information, and its usefulness being related to other people actually using an application. I’ve considered before how Facebook could be used as such a search tool in a similar way if it included sorting functions, since I have friends from different places on there, and I’m groups with people from all over, but it’s not set up for that. It’s probably an intentional decision on their part.
As an aside, if someone had lots of random friends on Facebook (friends they weren’t personal friends with, or if they didn’t keep track) the only way to sort where others are is to move your own current location to a place of interest (eg. Cincinnati) and then send event notices, with Facebook recommending friends nearby. A Thai acquaintance moved to Cincinnati this year and being from PA I’d lost track of which old school friends might be there.
I live in Bangkok, so I would be interested in finding out about other people really interested in tea here too (there aren’t many), and I guess to some extent visitors could ask me questions about here if they could become aware of that. There would seem to be no way to set confidentiality limits that would work well for everyone since people vary related to how little they would consider sharing about themselves.
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