A Tea Addict's Journal

This is the 19th year this blog has been in existence, which, frankly, is a long time, even if the past few years it’s more of a ghoul and less of an active blog. The reason I still pay for hosting to keep all this up is because, every so often, people would tell me that they’re going through the backlog and finding interesting information in it. I know how annoying it is to have a resource online just disappear on you, especially in this age of social media where everything goes away eventually, so, this site stays up.

It does also mean that there are lots of what are now skeletons on this blog, memories and impressions of places and people that are no more. I was in Yongkang a couple days ago, and passed by this storefront. It’s a dead shop, obviously, but I remember it as a teashop I visited on a few occasions the last time I stayed in Taipei for a while, back in 2007 when I would mundanely post every day about what I drank that day. The shop was called Hui Liu, and at the time was a vegetarian restaurant/teashop. I think I even bought some tea there, a couple ounces. Even by the end of my stay in 2007, I had stopped going to Yongkang for tea – it’s too touristy, with prices to match. These days I visit there mostly for the food, and for spaces where you can sit down and brew tea with friends.

But it did trigger a couple memories of how it used to be like there, and I dug up the old post of me talking about it. I was rather eager to learn more back in the day. Funny thing is, I don’t think I ever went back to either Yetang or Hui Liu. Yetang, from what I can tell, is still open. Hui Liu closed I think in 2018, replaced by some other place which has also now closed, as you can see in the photo above. I should really go back to Yetang and see what it’s like now. The owner, from what I can gather, spends most of his time in the mainland teaching tea these days. Hui Liu, on the other hand, is now just a memory.