Drinking Tea

I wrote before that there was a guy from Milwaukee in my class. His name is Jered Stoehr, and he really likes tea. He's got a friend in Ireland with a tea shop, and he helps his friend export tea from teahouse here in Taiwan. Jared is good friends with the proprietors of the Szu Hai Tea Shop and occasionally goes there to sip on their tea and chat in Chinese. One day after class, Jared took me to the tea shop with his Japanese fiance Nono (after getting a couple roubao, steamed buns stuffed with meat, at a place near his apartment).
We sat down at the table, it was pretty cool to watch how Jackie, the owner, poured hot water into a the pots to clean them all out. He then put some loose tea leaves into the teapot and poured hot water in. After letting it steep for a short amount of time, he poured it into a second pot through a strainer, and from that, he poured the tea into our cups. Overall, he probably brewed the tea 10 different times. Whenver I've known tea to be brewed in America (which is probably always Lipton, and it always comes in bags), it is brewed just once. We tried two different teas, oolong tea and bai hao tea, which I believe is a kind of white tea. The teas had a fairly light flavor, but they were good. The bai hao tea was naturally sweet. They told me that this tea plant produced more sugar when insects started to eat it. Jared would be able to give you a better explanation, I'm sure, since tea is a big interest of his. I had no idea that some teas were so expensive: Jared pointed out to me a picture in a catalogue of teas that were to be sold in an auction in China, and one of the pu'er teas (circa 1937) was going to go for about US$100,000/kg. Wow! Apparently fine tea is like fine wine: it gets better with age. Pu'er is Jared's favorite, by the way. A couple days before we went, he was telling me that he sat at the teahouse with his Irish friend for 7 hours drinking pu'er tea. He explained to me that drinking a lot of good tea can give you a drunk/high kind of feeling (Who knew?) and he had to lay off the pu'er for a while. All in all it was a really good time and a very good opportunity to practice our conversational Chinese.