Hi all,
Cultural Classes: Ceremonial Tea and Chinese Chess.
Cultural Classes: Ceremonial Tea and Chinese Chess.
On July 13th, as a continuation of our cultural classes our teacher herded my classmates, a handful of the people from the last trip to the night markets, and me downtown to a quaint little cafe and bookshop where you can bring your own loose leaf tea and use their proper tea sets to take part in traditional tea ceremonies. There are several types of tea ceremony and it differs from country to country in Asia, but Hong Laoshi (our teacher) taught us what she called 'Kung Fu Tea'.
Hong Laoshi walked us through the steps.
To begin, you boil water and pour it into the clay tea pot so that it overflows onto the tray below it in order to warm it.
Pour that water into each of the cups to warm them and dump the rest of the water out into a special bowl for just such a purpose.While the water boils again, use special wooden tweezer things to take each cup and pour its contents into the used-water bowl.
Then put the tea leaves into the pot using a special wooden tea-leaf carrying implement.
Once you pour the boiling water into the pot for a second time and let the tea steep for a few minutes, you pour all the tea into a large ceramic pot which you use to pour the tea into each cup.
This cup is not the cup you drink out of, however, this is the 'fragrance cup' which you hold to your nose and try to 'appreciate' the tea’s aroma.
Finally, you place the drinking cup on top of the fragrance cup ‘til it forms a seal and flip it over on a little mat, and then carefully take the fragrance cup off your drinking cup trying not to scold yourself when the top cup pops off and splashes boiling water all over your bare hands.
After this simple and easy-to-follow demonstration, Hong Laoshi, probably due to my Chinese-styled shirt, mistook me for someone skilled at holding pots of boiling water and asked me to take
over for the next round. Unfortunately, she began video taping me before she realized that not only am I not great with miniature cups of scolding-hot tea, but I also wasn’t really paying attention and already forgot the steps as outlined above. I thought we had to repeat the warming process from the beginning each time and started doing so, only to discover you just take it from ‘put the tea leaves into the pot using a special wooden tea-leaf carrying implement’ and so we had a few minutes of embarrassing footage as she told me what to do step by step and all the more-qualified students laughed as I attempted to get tea into the infuriatingly tiny cups.
After this simple and easy-to-follow demonstration, Hong Laoshi, probably due to my Chinese-styled shirt, mistook me for someone skilled at holding pots of boiling water and asked me to take
over for the next round. Unfortunately, she began video taping me before she realized that not only am I not great with miniature cups of scolding-hot tea, but I also wasn’t really paying attention and already forgot the steps as outlined above. I thought we had to repeat the warming process from the beginning each time and started doing so, only to discover you just take it from ‘put the tea leaves into the pot using a special wooden tea-leaf carrying implement’ and so we had a few minutes of embarrassing footage as she told me what to do step by step and all the more-qualified students laughed as I attempted to get tea into the infuriatingly tiny cups.  |
| Kim Pouring the Tea |
After setting the bar so low (I wouldn’t want the other students to look stupid on camera), each student got to pour the tea and thanks to my ‘What Not to Do When Brewing Tea’ lesson, they all did marvellously well. It took about four hours for us to all cycle through the process, but it was a great time of tea and conversation.
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| Pu'Er Cha |
We also got to cycle through several types of green tea, oolong tea, and a fantastic black tea called pu'er cha which is really strong and my new favourite. The green tea is rolled up into little dried balls and then they expand in the water to show their 'heart' and two branches. There’s one green tea whose flavour changes depending on who’s pouring it (or so my teacher informed us though I’m a bit sceptical and I think it’s actually dependent on how long it steeps), so we each got to pour that tea to see if we had sweet or bitter temperaments (actually, this was after my turn, I just did some oolong). The smell and taste really did change remarkably, and I wouldn’t have guessed it was the same tea from pot to pot.
The next week on the 18th we learned how to play Chinese Chess for our cultural experience. I already learned how to play it in China, but it was a fun refresher. Tek and I were paired up and we spent the entire hour and a half without either of us actually winning. I have great defence but 'I have no gift for strategy' as the indefatigable Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, and Tek had no defence but kept leaping over the river into my area where he hit my blockades and got shot by my canon. I had a whole stack of his pieces, he had about one pawn but I couldn’t corner his general. So...we called it a draw and went home. 
‘Canon’ in Chinese is 'pao' that is pronounced 'pow' which I find very onomatopoeic; it's also my favourite piece because you get to jump like in checkers and pounce on other pieces (and while I do it, I also say ‘POW’ just to complete the illusion). Very cathartic.
Until next time, thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing about your lives and adventures!
Love,
‘Canon’ in Chinese is 'pao' that is pronounced 'pow' which I find very onomatopoeic; it's also my favourite piece because you get to jump like in checkers and pounce on other pieces (and while I do it, I also say ‘POW’ just to complete the illusion). Very cathartic. Until next time, thanks for reading. I look forward to hearing about your lives and adventures!
Love,
Amanda
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