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Tea Talk, Issue #001 -- Dragon Well Tea Legends December 31, 2011 |
My Visit to a Maojian Green Tea PlantationLast week I visited a neaby Maojian Tea Plantation. I frequently go to puchase their Maojian Green Tea. Their tea is creamy, incredibly fragrant, and a real joy to drink. I could purchase the tea and leave within twenty minutes, but the plantation is so beautiful that I always make an afternoon of it. The plantation is surrounded by Guilin's famous karst mountains. The mountains are truly gorgeous and offer a stunning background to the plantation. The plantation is enormous and one could spend hours strolling through it. They grow their own trees, and you can see tea trees in all stages of growth. There are always tea pickers working in one of the fields and they are fun to chat with. I love to chat with the workers because it gives me a real insider's perspective on the tea. I also work in the fields every spring as a hired hand. Next to one field, where they were picking tea, I found one of their grandsons. He had caught a beautiful large iridecent insect and he tied a strong on it and was taking it for a walk. It is a traditional Chinese toy for village children. He was very proud of his bug and took great pride in showing it to me and letting it crawl on my hand.
I then went to the processing area. There was little tea being produced that day, but I chatted with one of the girls, whom I know, and she was frying some tea for her own consumption. After, I went to the laboratory where they were taste testing different teas from different fields. They generally do it on the weekend, when they get less visitors and very few people are ever allowed inside. I know them quite well and enjoyed a wonderful tasting with them. After, I purchased some of their remaining Spring Maojian Green Tea. When I finished, the tea processors asked me if I wanted to join the in a game of volleyball, which I gladly did. We had a lot of fun and played until the sun went down. Tea is so much more than just a beverage. It is a way of life and a way to gain personal connections. I look forward to returning for more tea, and perhaps, a little more volleyball.
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See you next month! |
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