Tea ceremony

I'm sure you have been waiting for this moment, when I finally will write about this famous Japanese tradition. Tea ceremony - 茶道, pronounced as Sadoo. The event was organized by one of the clubs at university, so I went there with 30 other students from Rikkyo Univesity. The ceremony was held in Mejiro Garden,  just 15-20 minutes walk from Ikebukuro. Realy beautiful place, surrounded by modern buldings (you won't see those in the pictures, but believe me, each "piece" of nature in Tokyo is surrounded by some modern buildings):

So, let's start from the beginning - the most important attribute for the ceremony is a pair of white socks, everybody must wear ones.

You must bow before you enter the room (it's not a slight Western bow, but a Japanese one - you have to kneel down, put your hands in front of you, and bow your head towards the hands) and then you may enter and take a seat. The laidies (hostesses) were so nice and told us that we don't have to sit on our feet all the time, we could place them to the side, so it's easier for us to sit. Afterwards, the hostesses enter the room:

This is how the room looked like from the place I was sitting. There is a "hole" in the floor, which has some glowing coal in the bottom and a ceramic jar on top with water. Before preparing the tea, hostesses enter the room with some treats:

The pink one is a sweet potato ball covered with sweet rice paste, and another one is a simple sugar/green tea candy.

Afterwards, while one hostess prepares the tea, another brings the drinking bowls from another room - enters the room with a bowl in her hands, kneels down in front of another hostess, and leaves a bowl in fron of herself. If the tea is ready, she takes it to the guest, leaves the bowl in fornt of him/her and bows. The guest must bow at the same time, too, in order to show the gratitude. A ありがとうございます - (arigatoo gozaimasu) thank you very much - said when bowing is a common courtesy. The hostesses were entertaining us by telling the stories about their previous guests, and about how they do ceremonies. It was very interesting, though I understood maybe around 5% of what they said. Well, it's good that other students did speak in English, so if something was realy not understandable, I could ask them for a translation. 

This is the tea:

I must assure you - the tea tastes better than it looks; the taste reminds me a bit of a seaweed powder diluted by water. 

The bowls are taken away the same way - a hostess kneels in front of you, bows (you must bow too, and say thank you) and takes away the bowl.

After the ceremony we went to another room to do some ikebana (いけばな). We should kneel and bow in front of the basket with flowers, then choose a vase, and afterwards do the ikebana - choose flowers and arrange them.

The point is not to choose as many flowers, as possible, usually it's only 1 or 2 different ones you have to choose, but to choose the flowers that would look good in the vase you chose and enjoy the whole arranging process. When you're finished with arranging, kneel and bow in front of the flower basket again, and take your place.

These are our "masterpieces". Guess, which one's mine? ;)

All-in-all the ceremony was realy enjoyable, you feel afterwards like you did a deed of the week.