Hamburg is a charming and quite busy city in Northern Germany and according to many sources, one of the biggest tea ports in Europe.

I went there for the weekend and after reading carefully Lahikmajoe’s post, we decided with my friend to go to the Hotel 4 Seasons.

To be honest, I was a bit intimated as I didn’t have trendy clothes on me but only the casual ones I had in the night train and during my morning stay in the city but I thought that it really didn’t matter (I looked at their website while I was writing this post and I saw that the dress code was Smart Casual, which I wasn’t for sure) .

This Hotel is famous in Hamburg and really upper class.

We were early (around 13h30) and as we looked around, we were greeted by a butler that said we were a bit too early for the cakes but that we could have a tea and that the cakes would come in a little while.

They had a decent choice with around 12 different loose leaf teas and they had a really nice card with small samples of each tea and a description in German and English (for those unfortunate enough not to read properly German).

While waiting for the cakes, we looked around and saw that the whole place was really like one of these English gentlemen club where you don’t want to disturb anyone and with the paintings on the walls looking at you with their gloomy eyes.

We didn’t speak about business and politics but about poetry, literature and other topics.

This (after all, poets are known not to care about their clothes, they are artists) together with the “if I was Johnny Depp, my clothes would be trendy” attitude helped me get better in a few minutes about this whole setting and enjoy the place and the tea.

The following day, we went to Blankenese, a charming little town all built around stairs, with a lot of former houses from captains and fishing people (for the old part of town).

Apart from finding a lot of pharmacies there (one every 100m in the new part of town, perhaps the people there are ill all the time), we were also looking after the first name to appear on the Internet when you look for Teestube (a close translation of tea salon in German) in Hamburg.

We found it in the newest part of the town, some 200m from the train station and it was like a piece of England in Germany with some Queen Elisabeth II objects (some were really kitsch like a small statue of the Queen waving the right hand in her royal way) and other posters/maps.

I was surprised by the number of teas available and we decided to go for a Blankense mix (Ceylon and Assam) and a Black Vanilla tea.

Both of them were good and after some inner questions regarding if they were using loose leaf teas or not, we found some proof that they were, which delighted us.

I sent a mail to the owner asking some questions and she told me they had 42 different teas from a German company that has been in the tea business for 120 years.

Checking if this is true could be the reason behind a next trip to this place (apart from the good teas and huge cakes).

A really interesting tea trip mostly thanks to Lahikmajoe and Internet.

Next time, we might also try the Chinese House.