By ELIZABETH FEIZKHAH

ASIA

SAGARA "Coming out of the temple gate,/ the song of the tea pickers:/ It is Japan!" At the start of the first harvest each May, Japanese from all walks of life don red sashes and headbands and fan out through the tea plantations, singing traditional songs as they ceremonially pick the new leaves. There's reason in their reverence: tea, especially the green (unfermented) form favored in Japan, is rich in antioxidants, which protect against cancer and heart disease. Tea devotees from east and west can worship year round at Greenpia (green utopia) in Sagara, 180 km southwest of Tokyo. Visitors can pick their own leaves in the 1-ha plantation, see them processed and packaged in the mini-factory, and sample green-tea noodles, tea-leaf tempura and tea-flavored ice cream in the restaurant. Picking continues until October and starts at 2 p.m. daily, with an extra session at 11 a.m. on weekends. For reservations tel. +81 54 252 3688 or E-mail naomi-w@dd.iij4u.or.jap.

EUROPE

SAVONLINNA Perched on a tiny green island in a lake, the 500-year-old Olavinlinna (St. Olaf's Castle) looks like something out of a fairytale. But its round towers and zigzagging walls are massive enough to have withstood several cannon sieges (it was the first fort in Finland built after the invention of firearms). Constructed by Sweden, later ceded to Russia and once used as the Savonlinna town jail, the castle is now a popular tourist attraction and--for a few weeks each summer--an opera venue. Highlights of this year's festival include Wagner's Tannhauser, La Forza del Destino by Verdi, and Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana; the British Royal Opera will perform Britten's Peter Grimes and Verdi's I Masnadieri. Through Aug. 2.

DUBLIN Ireland is as famous for poets and playwrights as it is for Guinness and whiskey, so it's not surprising that many of the country's great writers have been prodigious drinkers as well. On the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, a group of actors accompany lovers of ale and a good tale to a selection of bars--four or five is most people's limit--where they perform snippets from the works of once-resident writers. The honor roll includes James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and Flann O'Brien. Tours leave at 7.30 every evening from the Duke hotel, in Duke Street, and spend about 20 minutes at each stop.

GLOBE

CRUISES The intimacy of life aboard a cruise ship may foster romance, but it can also aid the spread of bacteria like Shigella and Giardia, which cause intestinal upsets, and Legionella, which sometimes causes pneumonia (and which killed a cruise passenger in 1994). While U.S., Canadian, British and Australian authorities develop an international inspection program, passengers anxious about the health of their vessel can look up its last U.S. inspection date and sanitation score (86 is a pass) on the Centers for Disease Control Website at www.cdc.gov. The CDC performs twice-yearly checks on all ships docking in the U.S.