Saturday September 1-Adventures in Tea!

Tang Jianghui and a couple friend of hers picked me up today at 02:00 to go to town for tea. It struck me as kinda strange and a little boring, but I accepted, because, well, what else was I going to do?

However, as is always the case, not only did I enjoy it, but learned about a whole new world…. I learned “The Art of Tea”

We walked into a tea shop and, because Jianghui’s friend is good friends with the owner, we were seated in a back room. The table is rectangle with the owner sitting on one side and all of us on the other side (like at a blackjack table).

In front of her is a large piece of tree trunk all weathered and hand shaped to form a flat surface (but does contain a drain).

She takes a large pot of boiling water and pours into and all over the teapot and into and all over the teacups. This is to warm the pottery. Then she drains onto the tree trunk by carefully pouring the contents of the 1st cup into the 2nd cup then into the 2nd cup into the 3rd cup, etc and finally into the teapot. She lets each cup overflow but the process heats each cup and pot.
Then she spoons the tea leaves into the pot. The leaves are not ground up, but are still large leaf pieces. More boiling water is poured into the teapot and allowed to overflow. The lid carefully put on and then sits for maybe a few moments. After that, the pot is emptied into another pot that she uses for pouring into our cups previously and meticulously set in front of us.

Each cup is maybe 3 ounces – so very small.

You drink and chat. As you empty your cup, the hostess refills your cup and makes more tea as necessary following the very same procedure.

After a while, she removes all the cups, pots, etc and pulls out a different set and a different variety of tea and we go through the whole process again.

We talked of nothing in particular … the tea process, tea set manufacturing (all are hand made),

our families, etc, etc. but just hung out (Jay could NEVER have sat that long. Wooden chairs with very small cushion). It turned out we were there 3 hours. It felt like 30 minutes.
What was so interesting also was that the tea set we were using costs around $2000.00 US and the we drank $70 worth of tea! Of course, this didn’t cost us anything because of Jianghui’s friend’s connection with the shop and because, as they told me, I was the 1st American she had ever served in her shop, so she wanted to this for us.

This was a green tea and while I have had green tea at local restaurants – and have not particularly cared for it – was amazed at how good it was. For $70, it better be good. And it was.

Now for the Michael Vick spin. While there, they showed me these little small containers with crickets in them (photo attached). Apparently, they have “cricket fights.” Put two crickets in a container and they will fight and bet on who wins. Probably not severe enough to take down a pro athlete and struck me as funny…”Hey Marty, wanna go the cricket fights tonight? I got new one that I think can run the table!”

After that, we went to a Sichuan restaurant for dinner. Sat outside on a rare but beautiful, cool evening. Reminded me of Virginia Highlands area…Chinese Artsy.

Very relaxing afternoon and evening.

Tomorrow – Mt Qingcheng!