We try hard to avoid the typical tourist crap, and we don’t have that much patience for the endless stream of temples, pagodas, shrines and cultural sites that so many tourists are herded through by their guides. Worse still, the descent of the locals hawking cheap crap at the entrances and exits gets old, quickly. Local markets and galleries bar and restaurant strips and music venues are more are speed. That being said, this just-for-tourist tea ceremony / tea sell-fest was pretty cool, the tea was fantastic and we learned a lot.
We tried four different kinds of tea -- oolong, oolong with ginseng, a green tea and a flower tea with rosebuds. The tea was brewed using an intricate, traditional method. After the leaves were placed in a cup, hot water was added and then quickly drained. This first batch of tea is never drunk, only used to get some of the bitterness out of the leaves. The second batch, brewed for less than a minute, is quickly poured into shotglass-sized teacups, and drunk in three quick sips.
They were selling these great porcelain tea mugs with removable loose-leaf strainers for 90 RMB, about $12. We got the same ones at a local market for 10 RMB, but we also picked up quite a bit of tea from this place.
One thing that got roundly trashed during this tea ceremony was teabags. They are made from "the sweepings from the tearoom floor" according to our tea-loving tourguide, and the woman who conducted our tea ceremony agreed. This may have been enough to get me off the bags, but time will tell.
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