Wenshan in winter with Tea Institute students

 "If we have nice weather, we'll go to Pinglin.", I said last week. Faced with pouring rain and just 2 days before the PSU students from the Tea Institute fly back to the US, we did what any unreasonable tea lover would do: we went anyway! The only difference is that instead of brewing tea outside, we brewed ours inside the 140 years old Nanshan temple!

 Surrounded by fields dedicated to Baozhong, Sam brewed my spring 2014 'subtropical forest' Baozhong. We could link the forest scents to those present in these mountains. It felt very smooth and calm.

 Andres then brewed the winter 2014 concubine Oolong using my silver teapot. It brought even more warmth and sweetness to our day.

 The Buddhist monk present in the temple kindly let us use this table and seemed interested to see these young students brew with so much calm and attention.

She brought us some Taiwanese snacks and a very fresh winter Baozhong. It was interesting to compare it with the spring 2014 Baozhong: more flowery and fresh, because lighter oxidized, but with a bitter lingering feeling that wasn't very pleasant.

So we had a last cup of the winter concubine Oolong in order to finish with a good aftertaste and we left after brewing a big cup for our generous hostess.

We made a couple of stops at several tea plantations to enjoy the sights and so that they can understand in what kind of natural habitat Wenshan Baozhong grows. Mountains, a river, mist, green mountains. It's also breathing the soft and fragrant air from these subtropical forests and remembering to find these scents in the next cup of Wenshan Baozhong...

It stopped raining!

A happy day for all of us.

And if the above hasn't made you smiled, then the following pictures taken at Pinglin's tea museum probably will:

Tea is Elegance.

Tea is Culture.

Tea is not always serious!