Tea Tasting is the new Wine Tasting

As promised: here are some more details on the two girls that I met and subsequently went to a tea tasting ceremony with.

I was walking along the Bund (ahem, the river) taking everything in, from the stores selling candied fruits and vegetables (yummy, candy tomatoes!),

to the construction I previously mentioned. As I was walking a gal asked me if I could take a picture of her and her friend in front of the skyline. I obliged, and then they took one of me (you can see that picture in the previous post). After the pictures they asked where I was from (both of them spoke amazing English, but they did teach me the word for "doll" in Chinese cause that's what they called me), I asked where they were from (Shenzen, outside of Hong Kong), and we talked a bit about what we're doing in Shanghai (they were here on vacation), they said they were headed to a tea tasting ceremony behind the Peace Hotel (also mentioned in the last post) and invited me to come along. I said, "oh-yea!"

We all walked to a building that I would not have picked out as a place for tea tasting ceremony, no way, no how (again, what's hiding behind door #1 here in shanghai!?). We were taken upstairs to a small room with one table, four chairs, and lots of tea. The woman who was our tea tasting guide, gave us a description of lucky numbers (6, 8, 9, 10, and 11) and why they're lucky...right now I remember that 11 is lucky in love and 8 is for prosperity. She asked each of us to pick which lucky number we liked the best, and that was the number of teas to try (we ended up tasting 6...any more than 6 teas is just a lot of tea). But before we drank any tea, we poured the first pot of tea over a Buddha statue, passed the statue around, and rubbed his belly with our left hand (you take with your left, give away with your right) for good luck.

Each of the teas we tried was traditionally drank at a different time of year, for a certain gender, or for a different reason (medicinal, beauty, etc). The first tea was a ginseng tea that started out looking like rocks; at first it was bitter, but it left a nice sweet taste in the back of my throat. The second tea was called a jasmine pearl tea, because the jasmine leaves were rolled up to the size of pearls. The third and fourth teas were both flower teas, one of which made a bright red sweet tea. The fifth tea was also a flower tea, known as the four flowers. It's called that because the tea starts out as a ball, a little bit smaller than a ping pong ball, but once it's in the tea water it opens up and there are four flowers. It was beautiful. This is a picture of that fifth tea:

The sixth tea was my least favorite, a very, very medicinal tea. And with that, the tea tasting was over. Just like when I tried tea in the tea shop, there was an elaborate tasting process, involving two tea pots for each tea. Also, each thimble of tea needs to be drunk in 3 sips...sadly, I can't remember why. After we finished, we were each presented with a Chinese knot for good luck. And this is a picture of the three of us after our tastings, full of tea, health, beauty, and everything else the tea provided.