Katarina is from Slovenia. She lives a "Chinese-style life" in China, especially obsessed with tea culture.
She brews tea daily, collects teaware, studies tea settings. A cup of tea slows time down — the best thing Chinese life taught her, she says.
Katarina also loves Chinese-style interiors: bamboo blinds, wooden furniture, blue-and-white porcelain. She turned her rented home into a "Chinese courtyard"; her videos are full of the tranquility of Eastern living.
Slovenia has mountains and water; China has tea and poetry — she loves both lives, she says. From Ljubljana to China, she lives a "poetic dwelling".
Katerina is a Slovenian tea-culture lover whose daily life in China revolves around tea - brewing, visiting tea mountains, learning a Chinese way of living.
Her life: she learned Chinese slow living - tea in the morning, a book in the afternoon, a walk at dusk. "Tea has softened the days."
Content: "a Slovenian Chinese-style life", "my tea-table daily", "learning to brew with a tea master" - quiet and elegant.
Going viral: her "drinking Biluochun in a Suzhou garden" video spread - sitting in a pavilion, tasting tea in the rain; viewers: "my heart calmed through the screen."
Insights: "tea taught me the present - while drinking tea, only think of the tea; that is the best meditation."
Significance: an international messenger of Chinese life aesthetics - showing European audiences the beauty of Chinese living.
Plans: opening a Chinese teahouse in Slovenia, bringing her Chinese tea life back to Europe.
For readers: her videos make you want to sit quietly with a cup - her lens heals.
She also learned "making friends over tea" in China - hosting a weekly tea gathering for Chinese and foreign friends. "One pot of tea brings strangers together to talk; that is tea most magical power." Her gatherings serve Chinese pastries and Slovenian honey cake, two tastes with two teas. She plans to study pu-erh making in Yunnan - "I want to know how a leaf becomes a brick of time."
Chinese tea taught her not just taste but cherishing - tea farmers treasure every leaf, tea masters every infusion. "This cherishing makes ordinary things shine." She now watches leaves unfurl before drinking - "that is a leaf completing its life." Her Slovenian teahouse will include a Chinese tea table, inviting more people to sit and drink "slow".
"Slovenian honey and Chinese tea - sweetness and aroma are the base colours of life."
"Cold tea can be refilled, so can days" - she wrote it on the teahouse message wall.
"My last lesson in China: after tea, remember to say hǎo chá - praise is the best refill."
"Chinese tea taught me good days are for slow tasting - enough for a lifetime."
