thepismire CURIOUS THOUGHTS OF AN ANT

Loooong overdue update. Hopefully I’ll have the motivation to crank out all of them. I have so many, that I’m even combining this one, hence the title.

Recently, a friend and I checked out the “tea street” here. Once we arrived (after we got ripped off by the rickshaw), it really was a tea street; a street just lined with tea shop after tea shop. They even had a multi-storied “tea mall”. However, upon entering the “tea mall”, instead of the glorious fountains of tea, fascinating tea shops, and the hustle and bustle of tea business, I found a sterile, cubicle farm setup of stores with hardly any business going on. What a “tea”se! Get it? So we left and just went into a random shop since they were all the same. In these tea shops, like wine tasting, you get to try all the teas before purchasing. And like wine tasting, there is a whole culture behind it. We sat at a table specifically for tea serving. We first decided to try some green teas. They brought the leaves out for us to look at, then smell. She then started to steep them. The first steep was filled into our cups, then promptly tossed out. This is to just rinse the tea leaves, which may have gathered some dust over time, and also to rinse out the cups, and other technical stuff that doesn’t matter. After steeping a second time, we can sniff the lid of the steeping cup, then she serves us the tea, and finally we get to drink. Everything seems so complicated just for making tea, but watching it all had a wonderful calming effect on. Maybe it was a combination of the sound of water being poured here and there, and the gentleness of every action that gives it this aura. Regardless, I was straight up chillin’. Altogether we tried about 10 different teas ranging from green to puer, and stayed for a total of one and a half hours. The cool thing is that we could’ve stayed longer and there wouldn’t have been a problem. I made some notes on some that stuck out:

Shan Qin Shui Xiu (green): Small leaves that expand quickly. It’s pretty bitter, but is supposed to have a sweet aftertaste (I didn’t get a hint of sweetness at all). I only like it because the leaves expanded so quickly, and the end product was something nice to look at in the teapot. Very aquarium-ish. Sorry no pic! Doh!

Lao Chat Tie Guan Ying (oolong): The leaves are roasted so you get similar flavors you would get from coffee. They say that puer or black tea can be a replacement for coffee in terms of caffeine, but I’d say this roasted oolong has the edge on the rest because of the flavor similarities.

Ren Shen (oolong): By far the most fun out of all the teas I tasted that day. If you want to talk about sweet aftertaste, this is it. Even if you don’t think you have a sensitive enough palate to detect it, trust me, you’ll get it. I even caught myself smacking my lips because of the sweetness. The funny thing is, the tea itself when you drink it is far from sweet. I don’t know what makes it does what it does, but I loved it so much, it was the one I decided to buy.

In other news, our Chinese class went on our Spring field trip to the botanical gardens. I learned that no matter how pretty, fragrant, or rare a flower is, it’s not worth a bus ride crammed with people for an hour, ONE WAY! Never again. With that said, the tulips were amazing. They almost looked fake, and their vibrant colors make some of my pictures look photoshopped. However, not too much to write about here, except that I caught a lot of bees in my photos.