In Seattle, we visited my dear friends Maki and Rob. They are just the kind of crazy artistic couple that makes me wonder why I don't spend more time making robotic light-sensitive baby doll heads and recycled soda can incense burners with my boyfriend. Anyway, it just so happens that one of Maki's many talents (aside from being a master printmaker and writing for nifty Japanese webzines) is making tea.

This talent, combined, no doubt, with her utterly infectious smile, got her a job working at the tea house in the Panama Hotel, an old brick building which dates back to the early 1900's, on Sixth and Main, right on the edge of the International District in Seattle. They have tea of every imaginable variety, prepared with exactly the right temperature water for exactly the right amount of time, served in glass teapots and cups that are so delicate I wouldn't dare to use them at home. We drank oolong tea that was very nearly clear. I expected it to taste like hot water. Instead I tasted a thousand different subtle flavors. It was kind of like drinking real beer after being raised on Miller Lite. I will never look at tea as brown water again.

Anyway, the most remarkable thing about the Panama Hotel isn't its tea house, but its history. The Panama Hotel houses one of only two remaining traditional Japanese osento, or public baths, in the United States. The Hashidate-Yu bath house has remained essentially untouched since it closed in the 1960s, and the changing rooms still have the original ads for local businesses above the lockers. The floor of the teahouse, which is upstairs, has a hole cut into it with a window to see into the basement below, which is stacked floor-to-ceiling with suitcases and other personal items that Japanese residents left behind when they were forced into internment camps in 1942. Many never returned for their belongings after the war ended, and so when the building was bought in the late 90s in order to save it from demolition, the new owner inherited an entire history of the residents of Seattle's Nihonmachi. Thankfully, instead of throwing everything out, she has preserved them there and in loaned collections to several history museums.

There is a book called Sento at Sixth and Main, written by a professor at the University of Washington, about Hashidate-Yu and other historically significant Japanese-American cultural landmarks throughout Washington and California. It is for sale at the Panama Hotel and is also available on Amazon.com. M bought a copy - it's really an interesting read - full of vintage photos, historical research and firsthand oral histories.

It makes me happy that there are people dedicated to preserving the few remaining sites which are unique to our international cultural heritage - that there are still magical places like the Panama Hotel which have not yet been bulldozed and turned into identical franchise restaurants and chain stores. If you are ever in Seattle, be sure to stop in at the Panama Hotel and have some tea and look at the old photos and the hole in the floor.