Last time yesterday, last tea market in Huangzhou, last shop round, bought heaps of trinkets, gifts, a couple of kilos of tea (liubao, Lapsang reds, one exclusive specialty from Wui mountains), great greens (fresh Well, White Peony) and 2 nice 350 gram cakes of white teas = these ironically made me the happiest….
We’re already having trouble getting everything home – we deliberately went to China with only 21 and 35 litre backpacks O:)
Today we’ve already taken the approx 4 hour express train ride to Chaoshan (there’s a train station there) and moved on to Chaozhou to see the historic center and especially the phoenixes that are grown and processed nearby… If we’re lucky, we can get right to the plantation, harvest some tea, process it ourselves and prepare it up to a cup 🙂
I was personally disappointed with Chaozhou at first – a beautiful downtown with sights, but it’s also a notorious tourist spot, so it’s full of kitsch and over-commerciality. Even the tea culture here isn’t as welcoming and nice as in Huangzhou… (I’ll discuss this after more days in my next entry from this place, though).
A warning for tea drinkers: in Chaoshan, perhaps only Phoenix is drunk (it is grown nearby), but in tiny gaiwans that are still filled to the brim = the final tea is fizzy, head-breaking and often incredibly bitter :))
Photos (we have hundreds of them already and xx videos) are still missing – internet is terrible after the hotels, so I’ll be adding them expost unfortunately.
Note for tea drinkers: if you ever come here (and not just for the phoenixes or the teapots made on the potter’s wheel), don’t be surprised that they store the teas here in big stainless steel „garbage“ baskets – it’s just the easiest way to store kilos and kilos of tea here…
I have collected observations about China from the last 7 days or so (they are rather hilarious), so I’ll publish them as a separate entry. Hope you’re not dying of boredom = I’m personally not happy with these entries, but I always put them together around 2am when the internet is somewhat working and it shows, unfortunately…
