December Holidays 08

After coming back from Chengdu on the 24th of December, I realise  that there’s one thing similar about life in Chengdu and life in Singapore. Despite Chengdu being a dusty, grey place (all the more so during winter) and Singapore being at the opposite end of the spectrum by being unnervingly clean, life feels equally surreal in both cities.

In Chengdu, days pass by in winter like a flock of pigeons flying past you: each brief, nebulous day seems as similar as the previous one in its fogginess and dreaminess, while in Singapore, life feels like watching High-Definition TV: everything seems so meticulously detailed, meticulously coloured, meticulously stunning, but everything passes by so fast that you can’t catch all the beauty, thus leaving you dazed by the visual bombardment of colours.

And in both countries, this surrealism which pervades the whole atmosphere makes me doubly doubt their existence. Could this all very well be just imagination?

To move on to another subject, Chengdu’s tea.

I don’t think there’s another city in China which can be as famous as Chengdu for it’s 盖碗茶 (literally cover-bowl tea). No it’s not a type of tea, it’s a method of drinking tea which is rather hard to translate into English, so I’ll borrow a picture from wiki.

courtesy of wikimedia

Traditionally, you brew your tea in the porcelain bowl and drink it from there. The porcelain thing at the bottom is basically a cupholder, your hand grabs that instead of grabbing the small bowl, which would be rather hot from the tea. The porcelain lid at the side covers the bowl if you want to keep it warm and you don’t want to drink the tea yet. The lovely thing about tea in China is that one portion of 盖碗茶 costs only five yuan, which is roughly less than 1 singapore dollar. Additionally, you can drink one portion of  盖碗茶 for three hours, because you don’t gulp all the tea when you drink 盖碗茶, instead you take a sip and then refill it, so the source of the flavour (茶母), is not drunk away.

But of course this is not English tea, so you don’t add sugar or milk, nor would people give you any if you requested for it. Adding milk is even more unadvisable when the Chinese themselves nowadays in Chengdu don’t even dare to drink milk made in China because of the melamine scare even though there are tested to be safe already. A recurring joke is that the Chinese should even win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for making known to the public the rarely-heard chemical of melamine, or in Chinese, 三聚氰胺.

~ by philocrazy on December 27, 2008.