It's a well-known fact that the human taste bud can only recognize four tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. All the other more delicate flavors come, in fact, from our sense of smell. It is an equally well know fact that therefore, when your nose's all blocked up from a cold, you can't taste things very well. Nevertheless, the entire experimence never ceases to baffle me.
For instance, I was drinking tea earlier. I know what the tea should taste like. It has a distinctive taste. It's honey-lemon green tea that Molly has bought me from when she was in Hawaii. I've had it before. I liked it. I couldn't taste it.
Or, to be more accurate, it tasted like hot water. Which I suppose it mostly is, but still, just hot water, no tea taste. It looks like tea, I know it's tea, I can't taste the tea. It's unnerving. I left the tea bag in, and sipped it like that, and continued to taste nothing as the flavor (even as the bitter part of the tea escapes from its little paper bag and gets diluted in water) intensity, so to speak, increased over time.
Those of you who know how slowly I can drink something, that was about the speed at which I was drinking it. With the tea bag in. My flavorless tea.
Then, half way through, my nose cleared up partially either from the vapor from the tea or the fact my body temperature'd gone up or the fact I'm getting well, or possibly some combination of the three. Suddenly I can TASTE the tea. Very well. And all the extra minutes I've left the tea bag in too.
Tea is not meant to be steeped for that long, but I can REALLY taste the tea now. Heh.
So that was my adventure with tea, while embarking on the ch17 chem review problems.
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