Tea Score

Last month, during the Game Developers Conference, our team went out to dinner at a restaurant named The Slanted Door. There I ordered a drink called Art Tea, it was the first tea on the alphabetically ordered list. My drink showed up in a wine glass filled with tea colored water, but it had a brown ball sitting at the bottom. It was the most unappealing presentation anyone could have come up. It lent itself to my co-workers volunteering what it looked like I was drinking and all the while laughing heartedly at my expense. Maybe it was the thrist or the fact that I could not take them all on at one time in a street brawl, but I let their jokes shine off and drank up. It wasn't but a few minutes later when the ball at the bottom of the glass began to move. In the most bizarre thing I've seen since the birthing scene of V, the 1983 TV mini-series, the brown lump bloomed into a flower.

So today, I spent the afternoon walking around ChangPing Town and came across a tea shop. The lady tending the store rattled off some Chinese, what I know realize must have been this..."Boy, I've got somethin' that'll blow your mind." And she pushed a baggie of flower buds into my hand, grabbed a calculator, punched in how much I owed her, and closed the deal. This has to be the best thing that has happened to me since I've been in China.

*Please don't burst my bubble by telling me that I can buy these things at Safeway for 49 cents a pound. They are exotic and rare in my mind.