One Year Away

Penny

See the new China 3 photo album!

There is a Chinese saying that states "Rather go 3 days without salt than 1 day without tea".  Most Chinese carry with them a thermos or glass container with brewed loose leaf tea – I think that it is comparable to the plastic water bottles that everyone carries in North America.  To better understand the Chinese tea culture, we visited Hangzhou and the surrounding area. 

Hangzhou is a beautiful  city that caters primarily to Chinese tourists.  The highlight of the city is West Lake.  The lake, which is in the center of the city, is surrounded by trendy restaurants and cafes and by a boardwalk that is free of cars and scooters.  Also, the streets of the city and the boardwalk are lined with large trees.  I particularly liked the weeping willows that line the boardwalk and that dip slightly into the lake… In my mind, Hangzhou has earned its tourism slogan of being the "most beautiful city in China".

The other main attraction of Hangzhou is tea.  The Longjing area of the city is very famous for its Old Dragon Well Longjing Green Tea.  The tea is grown in the mountains that surround the city and was the imperial tea for one of the Chinese emperors.  Our quest to understand the tea culture took us to the China National Tea Museum.   The museum was informative but what was most impressive was the area around the museum.  The museum was surrounded by tea plantations and by beautiful gardens with ponds  filled with carp (look like big gold fish).      

We decided that the next step was to actually try some Longjing green tea.  We headed towards the Dragon Well Tea Village that our guidebook recommended for tea tasting.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that we do not speak Chinese and that our taxi driver had her own agenda (i.e. take us to her friend’s tea house for a tasting), we ended up somewhere in the Longjing area that was not the tea village.  As we walked the small streets, we found the Imperial Tea Gardens.  For 10 yuan, we visited the gardens which once again were exceptional but 100% man made and manicured.  It was the perfect place to relax and enjoy a cup of Longjing tea, which is exactly what we did! 

Longjing tea is made to be enjoyed first with the eyes and then with the tastebuds!  According to custom, the tea should be served in glass cups in order to allow the person drinking it to see the beautiful tea leaves float in the water.  We were served our tea in ceramic cups but that was OK!  We did find that the tea had a great mild taste that was very refreshing.   

Still in  search of the tea village, we continued to walk around the Longjing area.  Due to the fact that it has a total of 3 streets and tourist maps were available every few hundred meters, getting lost was not a worry.  On our walk, we saw a couple of ladies picking tea leaves.  We went to take a closer look and the ladies took a few minutes to show us what they were doing.  I think that they were amused by us being there and taking pictures of them!

We continued walking for another 30 minutes and we finally found the "famous" Tea Garden.   The garden is actually a large amusement park with tea as its theme.  The place was almost deserted and we did no further tea tasting during our short (35 minutes) visit!