Tea and More Tea, Plus Fondue

I am having tons of fun playing Tour Guide Lady for Chris (my high school friend visiting from New Jersey) and Susie (her daughter, who transferred to CU this semester from Rutgers and is taking my Intro to Ethics class).

Our first day, the three of us had dinner together at the Boulder Duchanbe Teahouse, the amazing treasure of a building sent to us by our sister city in Tajikistan. This is a building so stunning in its detailed mosaics and other artistic delights that my boys even went on a class trip there when they studied Boulder in second grade.

Yesterday Chris attended my class, sitting next to Susie, both of them diligent students with their notebooks open, scribbling away during my lecture on Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior. Then Susie gave her mother a tour of "Susie's world" while I taught my 11:00 class and engaged in other toiling, including attending a Boulder Faculty Assembly Executive Committee meeting, where I wrote another in my sequence of poems about doomed love on the back of the meeting agenda. For dinner: cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue at the Boulder Cafe down on Pearl Street: I read just a very few of my poems aloud to Chris and Susie, who claimed most politely to like them.

Today we're to have breakfast at Lucile's, and then a tour of the Celestial Seasonings tea factory. I've done my best to prepare Chris and Susie for its overwhelming sinus-clearing Peppermint Room. Susie has class this afternoon, so maybe a hike for Chris and me? Oh, and of course, the outing to the knitting store, and perhaps to a quilting store.... And then, perhaps, more tea.