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Poor Man’s Tea: Mugi Cha
By thomas | December 17, 2007
A bottle of tea like the one pictured to the left costs about 200 yen at the grocery store. If you drink tea in buckets like I do (especially in the summer), that bottle doesn’t last very long. I used to buy several bottles of tea a week. It was expensive. It doesn’t have to be though. Buying tea in the big bottles is the most expensive way to do it. Check the boxed tea aisle instead.
My grocery store sells this package of mugi-cha for 200 yen. It contains 54 tea bags, each of which make several liters of tea for my overzealous consumption. Instead of paying 200 yen a few times a week, now I pay it a few times a year. Big improvement!
Avoiding the refrigerated bottle tea aisle and going to the boxed tea aisle can save you lots of yen. Even if you are loyal to a specific kind of tea, like お～いお茶 (Oi Ocha), you might be able to find a powdered form for cheaper.
Or you could just drink water ;)
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December 18th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Haha this is exactly what I’m going to need to read when I join the JET Program in 4 years :P
I’m bookmarking all of these. I have 4 or 5 of your entries bookmarked already, knowing they will relate to me eventually. :P If only I were already joining JET…then I could go ahead and put this to great use!
I drink a lot of sweet tea and water, so this post relates to me a lot. Thanks!
December 20th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Hi Thomas,
I’ve been doing this for awhile but I never thought of it as a hack until this post.
I like hot mugi cha so for me using the tea bags was just natural. But now that I think about it it is much cheaper.
btw, I’ve been suggesting downloading the comment notification plugin to wordpress j-bloggers. Nick at longcountdown told me about it. It let’s your commentors know when there is a reply to their comment. Here’s the link
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
Spread the word
December 26th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I love mugi cha too! I simply love the smell of the tea
January 26th, 2008 at 8:48 am
DOH! I need to start doing that pronto! Actually we usually drink water through our Britta water filter. That’s nice a swell. Don’t have to buy water anymore!
January 29th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
HAhahaha, I just started reading your blog and I have to say I am not disappointed with what I have read so far :D
As for the Mugichan suggestion, totally dude. That stuff is the only cold tea I drink at home now, good call, thanks for sharing the common knowledge all of us gaijin have to the noobies comin in ;)