Today we received a package in the post.

And inside it there was a thing that we have been craving for months, lovely teabags.

How come something so simple can make us so happy.

Well, I don’t know why, but it does.

I guess it’s because we are away from home for a while, and this reminds us of how good it is to have the familiar taste in our mouths again.

Tea is a big thing in Ireland, some would call it the nations favourite drink. Or maybe I am talking about Guinness, for some people.

I got to know the deliciousness of Irish tea when I moved to Dublin five years ago.

At first I said;

“No, thanks, tea with milk? No way, nope, not for me”.

I had been taught that coffee can be served with milk, but tea is always just tea.

Through the influence of some of my Irish friends and trying to adapt to the culture, I ended up trying it once or twice.

It was ok, nothing special about it.

Then, as my friendships with the locals (I always wanted to say that! HA!) were getting more and more serious, I started to drink tea quite regularly.

That’s because Irish tea junkies drink tea all the time, I mean it, ALL the time, at least every half an hour!

I remember when I went to the house of one of my friends, Mary, to spend Christmas with her and her family, in the west of Ireland, where the biggest tea junkie population is located.

As it was cold and damp, and we were all sitting around, tea proved to be the perfect comfy drink for us. It would go with all nice sweet Christmasey things aswell, such as: chocolate, cookies, cakes, pudding, etc.

That’s what we drank all day, (at night to the pub, for Guinness of course!). No need to say that tea was also the last drink of the night, after coming home from the pub, to get warm and cozy before going to bed.

So there I kept drinking tea occasionally, every time I went to visit my friends or they came to my house. But, wait! By that stage I hadn’t actually bought any tea yet.

That was the task of another friend, a more advanced tea junkie (her street name was Ms Niamh Brewster), she would drink a cup of tea every twenty minutes. Maybe it just seemed too much because I was not one of them yet.

As she came to visit me very often, and she couldn’t stay away from tea, she brought it with her. Fair play, so I would take a sip too.

Thinking ahead, she left a box of teabags in my house for her next visit. This was my introduction to Lyons tea… the best stuff on the market, by far!

But I still didn’t really know how to make a proper cup of tea, it’s not Rocket Science but I hadn’t quite gotten the jist of it yet. So one day, after we had a visit from our Landlord, Peter, and we offered him something to drink, we were really just being polite. It wasn’t really for him to accept or ask for anything.

I offered: “Would like some coffee, or tea, maybe?”, and, of course he went for tea.

I will never forget that episode, it was traumatising. As I was the only one in the house that had some teabags, and I had offered it. I was the one that had to make tea for him. I did the best I could.

However, it seems it was not enough as he discreetly poured the poor fresh cup of tea that I had made especially for him into the sink. Then he made another one, a good one this time, for himself.  I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to notice it, but I did.

Well that got me thinking that if I was drinking tea, I should learn how to make it. It could be handy, if sometimes I would want it and didn’t have any Irish friend at hand.

Thanks Ms Niamh Brewster, you taught me well in my time of need. Have a look here to see what I mean.

After I had learnt from Ms Niamh Brewster, I continued having weak tea, guess I didn’t want to risk overdosing on it.

A few months later I met my destiny, the man of my life, the one that would come to be my husband one day. A Culchie boy from the west of Ireland, and as you can imagine another tea junkie, one of the biggest that I have ever known.

With him, I got addicted to nice sweet strong tea with full fat milk. It’s so bad, but it’s so good.

Our affair with tea was going lovely, it was always there for us.

Until we moved to Brazil last year, and we couldn’t smuggle in any teabags. First came the cravings, then the withdrawal symptoms. We have tried to buy other types of tea, drank them all, but they are not the same, they don’t do it for us.

So after pleading for assistance, we got some Irish teabags sent to us. Twice already. In bulk, and this is the third time. And for that we sincerely thank our friends, especially Karen,  and family, especially Martina, back in Ireland, that sent us this precious thing to keep our vice alive.

They truly are good friends.

Ah, all this talk of tea has got my cravings going, so I am off to have a cuppa tea.

I guess I am a tea junkie after all.