TEA CULTURE

bubble milk tea

Good evening! :) I'm now going to talk about another important topic for Taiwan: TEA

Many of you maybe know the famous bubble tea ("zhēn zhū nǎi chá" in Chinese, which literally means "bubble milk tea") but maybe you don't know that this drink was invented here in Taiwan (in Taichung, the city where I'm actually living hehe) in 1980; it is usually prepared with black tea (hóng chá) or milk tea (nǎi chá) and tapioca balls are added at the end to give more "flavour" to the tea.
This is the most famous but there are maaaaaaany more! There are almost more tea shops than clothes/shoe shops, and there are a lot of brands too! Diagon Alley, Dragon Tea, Woobbee... just to name some of them.
When you order a tea they always ask you if you want it to be hot or cold, how much sugar you want and if you want to add ice or not.

tea in 7/11, convenience store

There are different types of tea: the most basic ones are "black tea", "green tea", "milk tea" and "oolong tea"; we also have "high mountain tea" (made in the mountain of Nantou - north of Taichung - or Alishan, north of Taiwan), "honey tea" and "honey black/milk tea". We can find fruit-flavoured tea like pineapple, passion fruit, dragon fruit, roselle, lemon, orange, than we have "coffee-tea", "alpine green tea", healthy tea with ginseng and "cake-cream tea" (usually with cream, chocolate and oreo, really dietetic).
A typical Taiwanese meal (lunch or dinner) usually consists in fried rice or fried noodles... and tea, a different one every day! They never get tired, really.. they usually put it in a small bag, to keep it cold (or hot) or just to carry it if they are in a hurry, and they drink in class, in the cantine, in the library, in the street... Crazy!


Last month I had a field trip with the University and we went to a tea house where the tea-pickers explained us how to pick the tea leaves and actually make tea; I learnt a lot of things about tea culture, such as the difference between green tea and black tea and how it changes in the different regions of the country, and I used a cloack (to protect myself from mosquitos) and the dǒulì (typical chinese hat) to pick the tea leaves. It was a great experience!

tea picking in Nantou