Friday, March 2, 2012

Music Classes and Musing on Tea

     I came home from school today without a headache, no small feat after subbing in a music classroom.  To the contrary, I had fun, and that was because the kids were having fun.  High schoolers were researching jazz musicians and doing some nice posters about them.  7th graders were working on a Garage Band project.  Each had to create a 2 1/2-minute composition for a movie trailer of their choice.  Those kids were exceptionally engaged, every one of them, and I was happy to oblige when one of them would hand me their headphones and ask me to listen and tell them what I thought. The last class of the day was the 5th-grade band, who had 3 pieces to rehearse to get ready for their performance in a couple weeks with the Navy Fleet Band.  They sounded pretty good for a beginning band, as if some of them might actually practice outside class.
     On the way home from school I stopped at a very nice tea shop only a block or so away from our apartment to ask about their pu-erh, a dark aged tea that's supposed to aid digestion, among other things.  Terry thought he might be interested in getting some more, after using up what some young Chinese had helped him get at a tea market last year.   However, if he does get some,  it won't be from this shop.  It's not that they don't have good tea.  The problem is that it's too good.  The least expensive cake of pu-erh was $HK450, which is almost $60.  It was a good quality tea, the young fellow in the shop explained, but it was only 5 years old.  Normally you're supposed to let pu-erh age at least 20 years before you drink it. So you wouldn't even think of drinking this tea for another 8 or 9 years.  The least expensive cake of tea that had been aged for 20 years was $HK1800, which is over $230.  So buying a cake of 5-year-old pu-erh and holding it for another 15 years until it's ready to drink is an investment, just as some people buy wine and hold on to it for years.  This tea shop fellow probably would have thought that the last cake of pu-erh Terry had from a tea market in Shenzhen was dreck.
     It seems a little unusual to have this fancy tea shop in our neighborhood, which is sort of a plain-folks place.  For example, when I came home this afternoon the aquarium maker next door to our apartment building was squatting on his haunches on the sidewalk in front of his store, unshod, nail clippers in hand. He was taking advantage of the warm and humid weather today to bare his feet and trim his toenails.  
  
       

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