I can't be arsed to read all 70-odd pages of this massive thread, so I don't know if this has been mentioned much, but...

Have any of you gone out of your way to find some non-brand name, home-made tea in different parts of the world?

I've done so whenever I do some traveling. In northern British Columbia, for instance, I found a wide assortment of teas specific to various regions of the province, made of different fruits and herbs (they were pretty much all herbal). They weren't in teabags, though, so I had to use a strainer. A couple of them were fairly good, but the majority of them tasted a bit too bitter for my tastes then. They're probably an acquired taste.

About 7 years ago I went camping with a group of friends at a cabin, and while we were all walking back from the lake to our cabin, a couple of the girls decided to pick up some of the local foliage at random to make tea.

So most people had a sip of this concoction they had made with these "weeds" in boiling water. It didn't really have much of a taste, as I recall, but about half an hour later my heart started to race... and it wouldn't slow down to its normal pace.

Someone drove me to the hospital fairly soon after that (luckily no one had been drinking), and my heart kept racing at about three times its normal rate. I felt like I was about to pass out several times.

In the hospital I was hooked up to one of those heart rate machines that beep at the same pace as your heartbeat... well, my heartbeat was going so fast it began to flatline! Almost gave my friends in the other room a heart attack themselves.

Anyway, the doctor on duty administered something that slowed my heartbeat down to its regular pace once again, and I was able to go back to the cabin within half an hour.

Later on I learned that the irregular heartbeat was caused by Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which is basically an electrical problem in the heart, but it's not serious. I guess the strange brew of tea the girls concocted set it off. It's never happened since then, even after heavy cardiovascular workouts.