Last Day, Tea Ceremony

Going to the Tea Room at Shop #8.
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Tea Ceremony

For our last day, Nathan gave us a choice of leaving at 7 am for Tai Pei to spend 5 hours at the National Museum looking at porcelain...or taking it easy and going to a tea ceremony. Evan was pretty overloaded and wanted to sleep in, so I chose the tea ceremony.

We had to go down a winding street and into a narrow alley of tiny shops

This was a different type of “tea house” experience than we had visited on our first day; that had been more of a restaurant, this was a shop strictly for sampling and buying tea. To get there, we had to go down a winding street and into a narrow alley of tiny shops to find Nathan’s favorite tea shop. We were greeted with pleasure by a middle aged woman who proceeded to set up her table with an assortment of tea-tasting paraphernalia as she talked nonstop (in Chinese, of course).

We bought 2 pounds of green & red tea.
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They continued with lots of talk—mostly not translated, but I could tell that it was gossipy talk about family, weather, etc. I did gather that there was some long story about the tea-lady’s son who had moved to a bigger city all of a sudden...but Nathan didn’t get why. Finally, the water had boiled, and the elaborate ceremony began.

The following things were laid out on a “drip tray” (which had perforations to catch the water overflow). Note that there was no tea pot used!

A metal tea scoop from which we viewed and smelled the tea.

A wooden tea scoop for scooping the loose tea into the tea bowl.

A tea bowl with a lid for brewing the tea.

An aroma pitcher (looks like a cream pitcher) for holding the tea after brewed.

Tiny bowl-like teacups.

A porcelain bowl with boiling water in which the tea cups were dipped.

Wooden tongs for pulling the tea cups out of the boiling water.

A bowl for tossing in the water from the first rinse of the tea.

The boiling water was poured into the tea bowl repeatedly, then into the tea pitcher, then into our tea cups. We drank copious amounts of green and red tea until I couldn't taste the difference any more! The tea was very good and was far more delicate tasting than any tea I had tasted before. We ended up buying a pound of red tea (with medicinal properties for the throat) and a green tea (with medicinal properties for the nose), both were grown in Taiwan.