Anyway, I'll write about yesterday for now:
My Taiwanese friend May and her boyfriend Fuu recently told me about high quality ulong tea from Taiwan. Apparently this tea sells for so much that tea farmers are the richest people in Taiwan. According to Fuu some farmers transport their crop in a Mercedes Benz…
So when they invited me to have lunch with them on saturday at Sageikanten, a place that serves Taiwanese food and tea, I was looking forward to trying the tea. May knows the Japanese owner, Miyata-san, who is a tea connaisseur. He was planning a trip to Taiwan to see the tea farms for himself, and after the other customers had gone May and Fuu gave him some tips and pointers. Fuu wasn't able to introduce the owner to a farmer in his hometown however, because it would have too much social implications for Fuu himself. It would involve a lot of gifts and dinners and such apparently. Makes social relationships in Taiwan seem even more complicated than those in Japan...
They had also brought some tea from an acquainted farmer and the owner poured us the tea to compare the taste. On the picture you can see the difference in color. Even though it was all tea from the same sort of tea bush, the darker one was harvested in winter, and had a stronger taste than the other two, who were harvested in spring in the same year. It never freezes in Taiwan though, so winter isn`t really cold.
The food was really good by the way! It was a lunch set consisting of several courses of steamed dumplings, rice porridge, a steamed meat bun and so on. You could choose from several kinds of tea from a menu, and the one I had was really fragrant.
The Miyatas were really nice. I asked if I could take their picture. Miyata-san offered to teach me Taiwanese cooking so I could start a chain in Holland. Might not be a bad idea. I said I would think about it...
I also discovered bapao is a Taiwanese/Chinese word. I told them that I eat broodjes bapao all the time in Holland. May called it something like baa pa~o. I thought they were Indonesian, but according to Wikipedia they originally came from China and were introduced in Holland through Indonesian cooking. Just an interesting fact.
