Can you make your own tea? #ComedyOpenMic Round 19

So yeah. I went to this tea house today. Because that is what you do, right? When you’re in China. When someone you’ve talked to online a couple of times comes for a random visit and you ask him to hang out and you hang out and you spend an hour and a half on the metro to go to this tourist trap of some town that is prefixed by ‘ancient’. It was a model street, with a model bridge, with lots of consumerism. But of course you already expected that, because this is not your first time travelling around, and there was food everywhere but it was so hot that I couldn’t even think about food really. Until there was this amazing smell of fermented tofu and then I did think about food and almost threw up. But that didn’t really happen, because I made sure to think about something else ASAP. Like my skin that was getting redder. Because of the sun. That incredible amount of sun, which no sunscreen can warn off as that sunblock has already washed away before you even exit your apartment building due to the amount of sweat that accumulates pretty much everywhere and especially at the general area of my forehead.

So yeah. We walked a lot and then we came to this large temple and at least they didn’t ask any entrance fee and when the incense was getting a bit too intense and when we saw about 15 Buddha statues which were actually pretty nice and I liked how they all showed different expressions and lessons about how to deal with life shit, we left. And we saw this tea house and it looked nice and the people there were very nice as they had some translation app and they told us to go upstairs and there was a beautiful room all for us, more spacious than my apartment, almost, and we sat down and it looked very pretty and then this man came and he asked a question we didn’t understand.

He asked:

Can you make your own tea?

We were shocked. It implied that there was something you needed to do to make tea and actually we had no idea and how to tell someone we couldn’t make our own tea without sounding ridiculous. And they showed us a list of Chinese characters that our app couldn’t translate because the app can only translate horizontal lines and these were written vertical. And there were numbers which probably indicated prices and some were cheap and some were twice my annual income. So I asked for Puer tea as I remembered that to be a Chinese kind of tea and I have no clue about tea really but it at least made me look a little bit knowledgeable, right? So then the Chinese guy told us he would make a little bit of tea for us and then we could make more tea. Of course the app told us this. And then he disappeared and returned with leaves and pots and somethings. And he told us he was first going to wash the tea and we just nodded because we had no idea what it meant and it might as well have been a translation glitch, and in the meantime we were wondering how silly they must think these foreigners are.

_{So I should have taken more pictures of this but I didn't because I was actually IN THE MOMENT. Picture by @nobyeni.}

So then he did it. He made some tea. I made a video of it but internet here is incredibly great so I will not upload it here.

And we drank it.

It was extremely amazing. I wish I could actually write about smells and tastes and all that but I find it impossible. It did have quite some caffeine, and mixed with the incense still lingering in my nose all of a sudden I was very much awake and mostly also impressed by all the small things that were needed to make tea. Only small things. We wondered if the hipsters really just looked at this kind of tea place and then applied the same model to everything else in the world. But perhaps this was a chicken and egg problem and we didn't really have time to go into it, because we were having tea. And making tea was kind of a full time job here, I could see that, so it made sense they asked people to make their own. Silly foreigners thinking that if you pay for some tea, the person will actually make it for you. So silly.

So we made some more tea and it began to be a very strong tea so we just added hot water from the automated kettle to the already made tea and hopefully the man didn’t see that because it’s probably against something religious or something. So then we sat and drank tiny bits of tea from tiny cups.

And then the man returned with another pot of tea. Cold tea. We had to try it, he said and then he left. And I thought, this is a great business model, I’m wondering if I’m going to max my creditcard. But of course they don’t take credit cards in respectable tea houses. But they did take all our cash, so all is well in the world after all.

Also, all the while this was happening, there was some group of people rhythmically saying Chinese things together. We had no idea what they said, but it was a beautiful thing and if you ever need to host a party, definitely get a group of people rhythmically saying things you don’t understand. It gives a great ambiance.

And if you think people will think it's weird, or that anything about you is weird. Well. Just like everything else in life… remember that NOBODY CARES. Nobody will read your blog. Nobody will actually make an effort. (Except maybe when it comes to guys working in tea houses, I mean, he did really make an effort.) And perhaps you think this is meant ironically or sarcastically. I don’t really care. Take your pick. Do your worst. Make a meme out of it. Celebrate the day you came to live on this small freaking planet that people tell you looks blue but actually it’s mostly brown… full of shit. To really see what something is like, you just have to dig a little deeper sometimes. And I don’t mean that sexually.