May Tea Party
If you read the post about the snake we caught last Sunday (see Name that Snake), you might recall that my purpose in cleaning up the yard was to have tea outside with some friends (actually my calligraphy instructor and her husband). In case you’re wondering what happened to the tea drinking, here’s a follow up report.
We decided to move inside for the afternoon, partly because of the snake, and partly because it was just too hot and muggy to be outside. As my guests had not been over since I re-did the tea room, I was quite happy for the opportunity to show off a little. If you’re looking to set up a tea room or area, you can get some ideas from these photos I took. Nothing you see is really that expensive or hard to get, although the red tea pot & white cups are from my nicer sets. The table is an old desk top I sanded down and refinished, and the wooden tea tray was a piece of trash I picked up at A-Liang’s house in Miaoli (see Miaoli Tea Party). As you can see, you can get a rather nice effect without spending an arm and a leg.
This is my arrangement for the first round. I used my best white cups with the saucers from my red set, and was very happy with the color combinations. The blue runner is a denim leftover from a jacket I had made, and adds a touch of casual western style to the presentation. The teapot is actually my wife’s (she likes black tea, hence the porcelain), and she also did the flower arrangement in the teapot on the left (see first picture at top for a better shot).
The second best part of a tea party is the snacks. At the bottom of the picture (left to right) are: green tea biscuits, carmalized peanut candy (chewy), and almond nougats. For some reason we didn’t have pineapple cakes (major oversight on my part), but they deserve a post of their own anyways, so I’ll do a rundown on them later. There’s a whole science to selecting snacks that match the tea being served, but I tend to cater to my own ultra-sweet tooth so that I can finish off the leftovers after the guests leave!
For the Second tea, we switched to the gaiwan, and I got out some wider, flat-bottomed cups that better suit the ‘green’ pu-er tea we decided to try. I really like matching these cups with my ‘gan pao’ tea board. ‘Gan pao’ literally means ‘dry steep’, and refers to the fact that there is no drainage system on this tray, so one has to be extra careful not to spill anything (it’s kind of the ‘blackbelt’ level of tea mastery 
). Rinsewater and leftover tea is poured into the red bowl (see pictures above) and then dumped when it gets full. It adds some extra work, but gives a much more elegant presentation.
And, last but not least, you need to have tea drinkers! Teacher Tseng, on the right, was my calligraphy teacher when I first started learning Chinese (almost 20 years ago), and her husband, Teacher Lin, introduced me to tea brewing and set me on the path to Enlightenment (which is the title of a great Van Morisson album that I highly recommend for tea drinking), and has led me to this blog!
— ‘So Quiet In Here’, Van Morrison (Well, he almost got it right!!)
“A glass of wine with some friends; talking into the wee hours of the dawn; sit back and relax your mind; this must be, this must be what it’s all about, this must be what paradise is like.”