Wednesday: 19/01/2011

Teahouse field trip! We had an hour-long bus trip to go to this very nice teahouse surrounded by gardens and ponds.

The tea is considered “very good tea” by Chinese people, which Sa Weiqi warned us does not mean westerners will like it more. My culture class group lucked out and ended up with mostly good tasting teas, but some of the flower based ones were hard to swallow. (Our Chinese culture class was broken up into groups of five or six. Mine is “Flying Turtles” and consists of Tom, Emily, Brett Bannon, Isaac, Alek, and myself.) The servers took forever to notice us, so we just munched on the billions of types of dried fruits and nuts until we finally realized everyone else already had tea and called over the server (fu wu Yuan).
I got the Eight Treasure tea, which I’m guessing had eight treasures floating in it. We were only able to distinguish a few, but we’re pretty sure there were orange peel, lotus root, and chrysanthemum. For these herbal teas, they just let the plants float in the teapot and when you’re low on tea, they add more hot water to the stew. Each batch tasted a little different as different herbs take longer to infuse (I just made that last bit up), but they were mostly delicious. I got my caffeine fix from the more tedious Oolong tea that a few others got.

This tea takes around half an hour to make and involves lots of putting different things in different pots with different amounts of hot water. I don’t remember it in detail, but it comes out quite well. It’s always loose black tea for Oolong tea. They way you drink it involves a tall skinny white porcelain shot glass and a short fat one. For every drink, the tea is poured into the tall one, the fat one is placed on top and the whole deal is flipped upside down. After it sits for a little while, the skinny one is lifted out while twisting, leaving the fat one with tea in it. After you smell the “hot scent” of the now-empty skinny glass, you can drink the tea. After drinking, you’re supposed to take in the “cold scent” of the now-cooled skinny glass.
Overall, it was a great experience! We lounged in separate opium-den beds with pillows, a small wooden platter with a grate for spilled tea and lots of pillows. The surrounding glass windows gave a view of a pagoda over the pond and plenty of house cats hanging out in the rock and gardens.

I now feel like I partially understand the environment that Edgar Allen Poe was so addicted to.