TeaHouse, Beijing, China

Dear Diary,

During visiting once again Beijing, I got experience of interesting new thing: tea house. Of course almost every person in the whole world would recognize, that Chinese and Tea belongs together. There are several famous tea houses in the Beijing as well as every part of China. I would say, that these are like hundreds of years old Starbucks and Robert's Coffees, where you can get all kind of small, tiny and tastfull...

First of all, Chinese tea is so complex issue in general, that I wount start explain about all kind of small details about tast, warmness, cups, different kind of teas and meanings and doublemeanings behind meanings what are happening past years in long "tea drinking culture". For western people I can say, that relax and enjoy. Think what you are doing. Explore everything with open mind...you will be surprised how much you will learn :-)

So...During trip to Beijing, our Chinese host and dear friend and collague JJ (we call her as JJ) asked, have (Ari and me) ever visited in Chinese Tea House. The answer was no....so we went there. Very nice and peacefull place in the second floor near Tiananmen square. First of all, the catalog was presented as pictures as Chinese as English, so in that sence we were lucky. I like lots of Chinese teas but in some sense during that time, I was mostly attracted to flower tea with rock sugar included...So in that sense I made familiar selection.

Then...suddenly I noticed something pretty interesting from the catalog! All kind of small, fancy stuff... I was so happy to see also the prices (one small plate with approximately 3 peases of something), which was about 0.3 - 0.6 EUR/plate, I asked from my Chinese hostress, that can I please please order those? She was smiling to me, partly because she was probably thinking that I was funny (have to admit that part) and partly because she knows I like to eat almost everything, which is not very spicy nor has not any bones. JJ said go ahead and for a first round I order the whole page of these "small things". Then I took a picture of it. The only thing was familiar were these "Spring rolls" what you can eat also in some Chinese restaurants in Helsinki or Espoo (Finland).