Sunday Excursion: Ups and Downs, all one day!
Sunday was a completely different story: our client, the Academy of Entrepreneurship in Chengdu invited all Grasshoppers to a bus tour to the country side including friends and family. With a delay of a few hours, somehow there was something wrong with the first bus, we finally got started. And same procedure as always, we were not the only ones who had the brilliant idea to flee the city. It took us ages to arrive at our first destination: a tea plantation near the mountains.
The day was sunny, we arrived at a tea factory first, and here the first stop was of course: the toilets! Better not to go into further details, I needed a second round, as the first experience was simply too shocking.
Anyway, all the women in our tour got theses “lovely” shirts and headscarves to wear, grrrr, the boys only got a basket on a string to collect tea leaves.
Some of us, or to be precise only Jeremy, found all the tickets that were hidden between the tea bushes, and funnily enough, he was the only one who had barely collected any tea leaves. But he had the decency, it only needed a minor twisting of his arm, to distribute the tickets among us. Later, back at the tea factory, we found out that those tickets were then transformed into nicely packaged tea, or lovely tea sets. I bought some Jasmin tea and a nice glass tea flask, that you can fill with tea leaves in the morning, and then you simply add water during the day, very convenient!
We also experienced how the freshly picked tea leaves were prepared:
From there we went to a little town, only 500.000 inhabitants (!), were we had a real feast at the restaurant of a relative of our client.
There were two nicely laid out tables for the whole group, and this is how it looked at the very beginning:
And here is the transformation after the meal was already well underway: it was magnificent, there was everything there that has to be dished up in a traditional Chinese meal, and there was plenty of it! It was spectacular! And do not think that there were only the “normal” dishes, no! There was jelly fish, very thinly sliced, and other delicacies that we cannot even spell. It was truly a wonderful late lunch.
...more to come!