A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘travel’

Welcome to Ohio

July 8, 2007 · 8 Comments

Well… sorry for the lack of updates, but as you have probably gathered, I’ve been rather busy moving from place to place. Finally, I’ve arrived at where the trip is about to end — Ohio. Took us a week to get from Beijing to Ohio. After driving for about 12 hours, we’ve gotten to Mount Vernon, Ohio…. and staying at a hotel for the night, look what greeted us when we got into the room.

Yum. I can’t decide if the 100% Leaf Tea (is there tea that isn’t 100% leaf?) is better, or if I should go for the naturally decaffeinated tea (how can tea be naturally decaffeinated?). Cinnamon Apple… I know not to go there.

I decided to drink the loose wet stored puerh that I brought along. Thankfully, they at least have hot water that isn’t contaminated by coffee.

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Long drive

July 7, 2007 · 2 Comments

Running around like a madman, trying to finish up all the errands we need to run so that we are ready for our rather long drive tomorrow to Ohio, where my girlfriend will be for the next year. I tried another Keemun today, from Karma Cafe in Cambridge. The tea was insipid, and far worse than the Tealuxe version. I know that I haven’t really spent much time on many other kinds of tea aside from young puerh for the past few months, and I feel now it’s time to revisit some old favourites and the like.

I’ve been poking around teamap to see whether or not there are places that sell tea around where she will be. Seems like slim pickings. Seems like my own stash of tea will come in handy when I come back to the States in 2008.

So the traveling continues….

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Plane tea

July 5, 2007 · 6 Comments

Why are teas on the plane so bad?

These days they put supposedly ok coffee (Starbucks) on planes, no doubt because they get a good deal from Starbucks so that they get publicity. However, the tea they serve is so, so, so bad. On my flight from Beijing, the food tasted ok, but the tea…. my god, coming from China, you’d think the tea would at least be palatable. Nooo, they serve those lovely tea powder type thing, the ingredients of which I still haven’t figured out. What exactly are those? They’re the same thing you get from cheap Chinese restaurants in the States. At the price of a dollar a kg for the cheapest green tea out there, you’d think they can afford something like that. Apparently not.

I promptly got myself a cup of reasonable English breakfast from Peet’s as soon as I landed in SFO. Too bad I couldn’t brew my own tea.

More traveling in the next few days before I get to settle down anywhere. I have a feeling it’s more teabag teas for me… in various forms. Sigh.

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Traveling

July 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Flying back to the US tomorrow…. so not much time or opportunity to drink tea today, or yesterday, or tomorrow…

Drinking some loose maocha in a cup works well on the train though. In fact, I think that’s my favourite these days when traveling on some sort of mode of transportation that takes more than an hour or two.

I guess you won’t hear from me until I get back to Boston and in some semblence of consciousness.

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Restaurant teas

July 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  It’s been 10 years already, even though it seemed only like yesterday when the handover ceremony took place on a very rainy night.  There were many things that set Hong Kong apart from China.  There still are, even after 10 years.  One such thing is the way tea is served in restaurants.

In Hong Kong, if you go into a Chinese restaurant or a Hong Kong style restaurant serving localized western or Chinese food (typically known as “cha chan teng”*, literally tea restaurant), tea is automatically served.  The type of tea served depends on where you are.  If you walk into a usual Chinese restaurant, the tea served is determined by you among the usual selection of “polay (puerh)”, “soumeh (longevity brow, or soumee, etc, a white tea)”, “teek guoon yum (tieguanyin)”, etc.  You pick among the ones they have.  In a “cha chan teng”, it’s usually some severely watered down red tea.  It’s more like flavoured water.  Tea is often free, or priced fairly low with a “tea and (Chinese) mustard” charge on the bill.  It’s usually the same no matter what you order.

In China, however (with the exception of Shenyang, interestingly enough), teas have to be ordered.  Even at pretty bad restaurants, the teas are often quite expensive, often rivaling a main dish or more.  A pot of puerh can often cost you 50 RMB or even 100 (at the fancy places) even when it’s just a really bad, insipid cooked tea.  I’ve been to places where the whole meal for two costs maybe 200 RMB, and a pot of tieguanyin would cost you 250.  They’re almost never worth that much, and very overpriced.  It makes ordering tea a real hazard here, without first checking the prices.  You could be adding a lot of cost to the food bill without knowing it, and not getting nice tea in return.  I often never order tea here at restaurants, but eating without drinking some tea makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Tonight, for example, as we’re having a dinner gathering with a few other grad students from my school here in Shanghai, we ordered a pot of longjing.  I think it was something like 50 for a pot, but the tea we got wasn’t even longjing.  It was at best what they would call a “Zhejiang longjing”, which basically means super low grade longjing that is merely a green tea, and called longjing for the simple reason that they’re grown somewhere in Zhejiang.  Everybody noted how cheap the tea is.  The food was good, the tea was not.  It’s a shame that even when charging somebody for the tea, they couldn’t give us something slightly better.

I hope that eventually, China will have restaurants that start offering good tea for not much money (at least proportional to the quality and not outrageous).  Right now though, I’d advise anybody coming here to avoid teas in restaurants.

*This is non standard romanization, as I am merely trying to replicate the Cantonese sound and not following any romanization scheme.  Besides not knowing any well enough, there are a few competing ones and I feel that none of them make intuitive sense for people who aren’t already familiar with Cantonese.

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Maocha in a cup

June 29, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I spent most of the day on a train from Beijing to Shanghai.  On the way, I drank a maocha I bought way back when I first got to Beijing.  I think I must’ve bought it on my second or third trip to Maliandao.  I remember getting 100g of it, wondering whether it will age well, or if it’s good at all.  I knew very little about maocha at that point, having not tried any before.  It was all an experiment.

Almost a year later, I am brewing it, grandpa style, in a paper cup with train water. Unfortunately, I packed the cable for camera-to-computer in my luggage that I left in Beijing, so no pictures… but the tea is surprisingly sweet that way.  Of course, I didn’t use much leaves.  Using too much leaves will mean it will get nasty, bitter, and astringent.  The key to making young puerh palatable, at least in these long, uncontrolled infusions, is to use little leaves and not quite boiling water.  Then, almost everything tastes good.

The leaves are very thick, and the taste reasonable.  It’s not too strong, although there’s some throatiness to the tea.  I think it’s fall tea, or possibly summer tea.  It’s definitely not spring picked.  I need to evaluate it more properly in a gaiwan under normal conditions to be able to say anything definitive about it, but as a drink to pass the time on a train ride, it does its job admirably well.  At the very least, I don’t think this is green tea puerh and should age.

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Moving

June 28, 2007 · 5 Comments

Moving a good amount of tea is hard work. Last night I packed up my tea cakes as best I could, by first tying them into tongs of varying sizes, then double wrapping them in food bags that are more or less like saran-wraps, I then hauled the tea over to the post office here with my girlfriend helping me. The thing about China Post is that all packages must be inspected before they are sealed — they want to know what’s going into them boxes here in China. At the post office closest to me, the guy who does the packaging said he can’t ship tea like this — too much tea is considered commercial goods, and have to go through the central international post office. Thankfully, that’s not too far away, and we went there — only to discover that there’s no restriction on tea export (as I have guessed). It’ll be insane to tax goods going out of your country, after all.

Most of the time packaging is also sold through the post office. There are almost no stores that will sell you paper boxes here — people reuse old ones, mostly, and if you’re shipping stuff, you buy it from the post office (since you have to bring stuff over for them to inspect anyway, it’s almost pointless to pre-pack anything). Unfortunately, most of the boxes there are not the right sized, so I couldn’t put all my tongs in one or two box, as I have hoped. Instead, I put about two tongs of tea in each box, buffered by other things including my loose teas, canisters, teaware, etc etc…. all in all, it took about 5 boxes to send all my tea related stuff over to Hong Kong. Most of the stuff will then stay in Hong Kong, at least for the near foreseeable future — I think my puerh will age better there than anywhere else, and since I’ll be moving around a lot… it’s better to stick them in one place.

Meanwhile, I am traveling to Shanghai tomorrow, with only one tea that I didn’t pack up — a maocha I bought on one of my very first trip to Maliandao this year. The rest… I’ll have to find my good friends who own more tea than I do to supply me for a few days while I’m there 🙂

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Back in Beijing

June 26, 2007 · Leave a Comment

After a longish ride on the train from Shenyang, I’m back in Beijing.

There isn’t much to report, other than it’s really frustrating when you need a cup of tea, and the only place that sells teas to go in China is either a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. It’s sad. It’s sadder when the server made the mistake of pouring you coffee and you only realized when you walked out and into the train station, waiting in line, and sniffed….

Tomorrow afternoon I might make my last trip to Maliandao in quite some time. It will be kinda sad 🙁

PS: I was notified that the picture for the jade gaiwan for my entry two days ago didn’t show up. That has been fixed. Thanks DH for pointing it out!

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Shenyang

June 24, 2007 · 2 Comments

Sorry for not posting updates the past day and half. I’ve been out touring the city, but also because the internet here is really spotty — up and down whenever it feels like. I’ve never had a stable enough connection to do much of anything — even my emails are only getting checked slowly.

Mind you, there isn’t a whole lot to report on the whole tea drinking thing here in Shenyang. One big reason is because they don’t seem to drink much of it here. Unlike most of the places in China that I’ve visited, which are either big cities or in tea producing regions, Shenyang is not a big city (I guess it’s better called a second or maybe third tiered city in China) nor in a tea producing region. It seems like people here aren’t really into tea drinking. There are very few stores that are dedicated to tea, even in the touristy areas, and the few that do have your very generic selection of regular offerings — jasmine, greens, a few tieguanyins, some oolongs, and maybe a puerh or two. I’ve encountered two puerh only shops, but the prices are not exactly low, and the selection lacklustre. All in all, a boring place for tea.

The “tea” we had today for lunch was a good example of people’s attitude here towards the drink. This is what was in the 500ml metal pot

See those black specks? Those are the only leaves in the pot. I should add that they were reused from the previous sitting — i.e. they brew out the same leaves, from what I can tell anyway, for the whole day. Yeah. In fact, I haven’t had a single cup of tea here that isn’t ultra bland, except what I had this morning

Which is from…..

Shoot me now.

So as you can probably imagine, I haven’t been spending much time with tea, and drinking the Assam and the Lapsang Souchong I’ve brought along as my supply of decent tea.

I have, however, been doing some touring of this rather pleasant city (apart from the lack of tea). As I’ve stated before, this was the capital of the Manchus before they conquered China, and so there are some historical sites here. Yesterday, we went to the Zhaoling, or the Luminous Mausoleum, for the second Manchu emperor Hong Taiji. The place is big…

If you look very carefully… you might be able to see a hint of the yellow roof of the main building in the distance. Or not. It’s big. The best part of the park was our ride around the park on a rented tandem bike (all 3 of us). Otherwise… it’s a lot of walking to get to places.

The actual mausoleum complex is not that impressive… but it’s the most elaborate this side of the Great Wall.

See that mound in the back? That’s where the ashes went.

The park has a conspicuous absence of any sight of a tea room — nowhere to drink tea. This further cemented my impression of the place as having not much tea.

We went to the Liaoning provincial museum today, which is a must-go. I was very very pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the museum itself, which was brand new despite the slightly ugly architecture

But they had a lot of Qing imperial collections, along with artifacts from earlier periods. Among which is one of my favourite calligraphers, Song Huizong, who is also the author of “Daguan Chalun” or the Treatise on Tea in the Daguan reign”. I took one picture of one of the stuff they had on display.

Among other collections, there was a nice jade gaiwan… note the more rounded lid (as opposed to the modern gaiwan with usually flatter lids). Gaiwans back then were used more for sipping tea out of (with leaves in there, I think) than just for brewing…. which I think might be part of the reason why.

We then went to the imperial palace, and the mansion of the last warlord who lived here, but that’s far too many pictures and probably not terribly interesting. Maybe another day, if it seems interesting enough. But if you ever come to Shenyang (4 hours train ride from Beijing, for those of you who might go to the Olympics or after) just remember to 1) bring your own tea and 2) go to the provincial museum!

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Traveling in China

June 21, 2007 · 10 Comments

These days, wherever you go in China, as long as the hotel is semi-decent it is bound to come with a water boiler, of the cheap plastic kind. This one I’m staying at is no exception. Except, the hotel is fairly new and the water boiler still smells a bit like plastic. Also, they don’t have real glasses here. Instead, I get this:

The white cup is detachable from the base — in fact, it’s just a regular plastic cup slipped into a handle of some sort. It’s not very elegant, nor ideal for tea sipping, but since I wanted to travel light and not carry around a big load of teaware, this will have to do. The stains are from the previous tea that’s still in the cup.

I only took two teas with me on this trip – the Assam that Mr. Lochan gave me, and a Lapsang Souchong. I tried both in the plastic cup by now, and I must say I like the Lapsang Souchong better. It’s got a nice sweet aftertaste and mellows out evenly as infusions go on, whereas drinking the Assam, I really feel the lack of milk was making the tea less enjoyable than it could be. The tea is more bitter, and doesn’t quite turn sweet in later infusions the way the LS does. I think this has much to do with the intended market for such teas, and the preferences of the target audience. A tea like LS will not sell well in China if it doesn’t turn sweet, whereas the way this LS is is probably a touch too light to go with milk.

I think this might also account for the way the Indian Oolongs behave. They brew a bright, strong introduction, but then fades fairly quickly as infusions go on. I think they’re probably just not meant to be drunk that way at all, and drinking it Chinese style is probably not “getting” the tea. Perhaps if stuck in a big porcelain teapot, with some scones on the side, they will beat any Chinese oolong brewed the same way.

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