Tea Culture

It's been a great day today. This morning, the roads were EMPTY and I dropped KS and reach my office in less than an hour! And just now, I went out on a market survey with three others, two of them designers to Petaling Street.

Petaling St has always been where one would bring tourists to buy "genuine imitation" stuff - bags, DVDs, sunglasses, wristwatches, you name it. However, amongst my artistically inclined friends, they always go there to get supplies like flowers, deco, Chinese tea related stuff etc. And people always talk about the food there. I've never seen Petaling St in that light before since the last time we had a meal there as a family decades ago, the restaurant charged us exorbitantly for food that wasn't so great anyway.

Today, I finally went with the eyes of a designer and visited a Chinese tea shop in Petaling St. The art of drinking Chinese tea is waaaay beyond what is involved in drinking wine, which to me, is already quite overwhelming. Did you know there is a sniffer cup for drinking Chinese tea? It's a longish cup which you pour the tea into before transferring the tea into a cup. Then you sniff the sniffer cup to excite your senses before drinking the tea. Wah lau... that's just a fraction of the whole art to it. Okay, maybe wine has about the same list of fuss you need to do before downing it, I don't know.

Anyway, my colleague decided to get me a little tea pot and some cups as my farewell gift. I'm so touched. Gonna start drinking tea a bit more properly now. What used to be "drink in quantity" will now be changed to "drink in quality" with tiny cups and sips. You saw my photo of my green tea drinking? It's a bowl compared to what the actualy Chinese tea cups are. And my new delicate tea pot is like 5 times smaller than my existing giant one.

Okay, I won't bore you with details as to how to properly brew the tea. Just some quick tips based on what I've been doing for some time; for green tea, do NOT use boiling water; for a clay tea pot, do NOT wash with soap; waiting time for the tea to brew is only 30 to 40 seconds, not 10 minutes. No wonder my tea drinking skills at home always killed the tea.

And just to add, we had great food in Petaling St. Ask me again in a week's time as to where to go, I'd have forgotten. I've been getting bouts of forgetting this and that the last couple of days. Of course I blame it on ageing. But oh! I must mention this! My colleague ordered soup for each of us and I waved a RM10 in front of the trader, thinking it would be enough. It cost RM26 for 4 bowls of soup! Man... I wanna boil soup and charge that amount too.