i'm just gonna throw this out there right now: picking tea leaves is interesting and fun for about 15 minutes. after that, bending over in the sun digging through bushes for the perfect tea leaves for eight hours a day gets a little old.

let me put this in some context here. on saturday morning most of us piled into the good old zhejiang university of technology tour bus and headed out into tea land. first stop was the national tea museum (one of many around the country) a bit out of town. there was a fairly interesting tour of the sites, with an introduction to the types of chinese tea (seven i think: green, red, black, oolong, yellow, white. so i guess only six). apparently, china is the only country in the world which regularly uses more than one kind of tea as part of its culture (i.e. japan: green; england; black; america: iced (i'm not kidding on this last one, the chinese actually consider it a unique kind of tea inveted by americans)). after that, we wandered around the grounds for a bit before lunch, which was really nice. I feel like all the flowers around here bloomed on friday night. today was the first day of really nice weather, though it was still sort of that perpetual haze that seems to envelop hangzhou.

after lunch, we trucked quite a ways out of town to a tea farm. hangzhou is famous for its dragon well tea, but the most famous is the west lake dragon well tea, which really describes nothing more than its proximity to the lake. that stuff is really expensive, many hundreds of dollars for half a kilo. so they certainly weren't about to let a bunch of foreigners tramp through their tea bushes (that sounds sorta dirty).

the place we went to was better anyway. instead of west lake dragon well tea, they grew zhejiang dragon well tea, which is exactly the same thing. we got to see them treat the already picked leaves, which they do by roasting them for about 20 minutes in a sort of big pot. then they store the leaves for about a month, when they are sold. we got to drink some of the freshly made stuff, not the best, but it's really amazing the difference between the crappy tea i bought at the supermarket and this stuff.

we were also treated to a rousing presentation by a pre-eminent professor of tea (you can major in tea in china), who was this tiny old dude and we couldn't understand what he was saying at all. awesome.

then we headed out to the fields. i asked our guide, another tea scholar, whether all the pollution was having any effect on recent tea crops. he said yes, but the problem was people messing up the fields, not any water or air pollution. i looked at a pool of sludge and garbage that we walked by on the way up to the fields and decided that i don't know what to think about that. out in the fields our guide showed us how to pick appropriate tea leaves, then we went off to do the work. after a while i wandered back, only to find that everyone had moved on and i was all alone. but never fear, i found them, and then we bothered some real tea pickers and gave them the leaves we picked. only one of mine was not up to snuff, so i guess i have what it takes to earn 8.50 a day picking tea leaves in china.

below is a picture of the tea fields. stuck in the middle was a family's ancesteral grave site. this is the time of year that everybody visits their family sites to make offerings, set off fireworks (of course), etc.



that is all. hopefully i'll squeeze out another one of these before durrell and i take off for break.