Rain over Xi'an.

Today John and I have just been strolling around. We deserve a break from tourism, and today is afterall John's birthday.

In the muslim area of town we came across a tea-place where they sold and gave samples of different Chinese teas. So far Chinese teas have been a huge disappointment -- luke warm weak crap, that tastes more of the horrible tap water they have here than of tea. And I don't like the normal green tea that they often offer us, it tastes like seaweed.

But this woman in the store took more pride in the whole tea-business. She let us sample a lot of stuff. New to me is that they store tea in compressed cakes, often with a nice socialist star embossed for added effect. The tea seems to develop flavour over the years, and they had tea that had been stored for up to 10 years. We tried a 5 year old tea that had a distinct smoke flavour, almost like a whisky. Very special, and completely unknown to me. We also sampled some lichi tea, where the tea plants apparently had grown with lichi trees, and gotten it's flavour from it. The oolong tea they had was very rich, but with a little strange flavour to me, harder to like. But in general, the whole experience was interesting, and gave me a little more insight and respect for their whole tea-mania. We even went to the national tea-museum in Hangzhou, but the sampling there was much less impressive -- and maybe we got a little duped. As always.