I can’t believe how cool this is.  I went to Muji and bought their jasmine tea: it comes in a ball that opens up when you add water (yep; you guessed it-that’s the before and after photo of the tea above).  I think this is possibly the greatest tea ever (and it tastes great).

Incidentally, for the best dim sum ever, check out Din Tai Fung in Singapore’s Paragon Center (weird coincidence: the franchise on this island is owned by BreadTalk-who I was talking about yesterday).  Apparently I’m not the only one who love them.  The New York Times has this to say (about their LA branch):

So are the dumplings -- gorgeous pleated things, fashioned from pastry of exquisite fragility -- at DIN TAI FUNG in Arcadia, right in the shadow of the Santa Anita racetrack. A branch of a storied establishment in Taipei, this too is chronically S.R.O. But here it's fun to wait, because you can watch the young men in their glass-walled room, dressed in white from shoes to baseball caps, as they make the dumplings by hand with the aid of tiny rolling pins.

If you go on Saturday or Sunday morning, you can sample xiao long bao, small dumplings filled with broth, often called Shanghai soup dumplings. You will find no better example of this delicacy anywhere. But pork dumplings and a pork and crab combination are no less juicy, nor are the open-topped shao mai, redolent of five-spice, which resemble tiny pomegranates.

Change of pace? Have a tossed salad in a sack, in the form of vegetable dumplings, densely packed with chives and greens.