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Picking Dragon Well tea, Hangzhou |
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Dragon Well tea leaves. The picker’s fingers are stained with tea oils. |
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Picking Dragon Well tea, Hangzhou |
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Dragon Well tea leaves. The picker’s fingers are stained with tea oils. |
High tea at the Peninsula Hotel is a Hong Kong institution, but after seeing the grumpy faces in the long, long queue we decided to head over the road to the Intercontinental Hotel and see what they had to offer.
What a pleasant surprise it was – no queues, fabulous Hong Kong harbour views from floor-to-ceiling windows, and high tea in an art-deco inspired server with a choice of coffee or Mariage Freres teas. Delights such as rose scented raspberry cheesecake, green tea delice, scones with earl grey jelly and clotted cream, and miniature individual balck forest gateaux had me in high tea heaven. And guess what? You pay a lot more at the Peninsula to stand in a queue for an hour then sit in a dark lobby with no view.
1. I like chewing bones. Really gnawing them, then spitting them out on my plate. But I’m not really Chinese because I don’t spit them directly on the tablecloth.
2. I wear slippers. In the house. But sometimes I forget to take them off when I go outside. Now that I think of it, that’s actually very Chinese.
3. I take a thermos of oolong tea to the park. But I’m not really Chinese because I can’t see the attraction of drinking tea out of a plastic tupperware container or an old coffee jar with a screwtop lid.
4. I have started to use chopsticks for eating almost everything, and for spaghetti, I prefer them to a fork.
5. I can still act truly shocked and exclaim ‘tai guai le!’ ‘too expensive!’ when told that the item I’ve always wanted is less expensive than I could dream possible.