Taiwan Tea Tasting, The PROPER Way to Drink Tea

Good morning, walking through alleyways in Taipei on my way to go buy some tea. What I noticed about Taipei is that most residential areas, residential buildings, kind of look like this. Tea shop wasn't open, now I'm stopping for soup dumplings. Like I mentioned before, all the Taiwanese soup dumplings are kind of the same. They're all tiny, looks a little doughy. This one is made with gourd. I like dumping the soup out first, which there's not a lot. It's more like little bits of sweat in the soup. Dip it in the hot sauce and vinegar. Not a lot of soup, but tasty. These look kind of legit. They're toasted crispy on the bottom, which these buns should be. Look at this. Those great doughboy looking things. The hotel recommended this place, Xinhua Tea. Let's take a look. It's cool. You can try out the tea right here. Oh, yeah. Smells very nice and soft and fragrant. Oh, okay. So the first one was to make the tea leaves wet. So now, this is the third time. Okay, so I'm supposed to pour this into this basin here. And then you're supposed to smell this here. Mmm, that's very fragrant. And then you drink that. So this vessel is only to smell it. You have to get the scent of the tea. And then you drink from this tea cup here. I don't know much about tea, but I mean, this is very light. It's almost like you're drinking the fragrance. Slightly bitter, but in a good way. Not like a crazy bitter melon-esque way. It's nice. The tea master is telling me you can make eight pots of tea. Like eight of those little pots of tea using one batch of tea leaves. That's why it's high quality. Getting a crash course on tea on the last day here. Yeah, they're saying this is all natural. No other fragrance is added. He's saying you got to use small vessels like that. Because the good tea, if you put too much water, it's going to dissipate. So for you to have the nice drink and fragrance, you got to use small vessels. Because I was wondering, because you don't see giant teapots at the store. You only see little teapots. The second floor of this place, it's a tea processing factory. The leaves come straight from the mountains. They bake it here. And so all this stuff is... Yeah, and then they package everything here. So this is as close to natural tea as you can get. If you're ever in Taipei, I'll put the location to this place in my description box. Come and check them out. Come in. They're all super nice here. It's been a really good experience. I didn't expect this on my last day here, but it's really awesome. This is like a family-run business. That's the father. That's the son. This is so cool. They're going to take me to the second floor tea processing area. And we'll go take a look. Yes. So all the tea leaves come from the mountains. And it's here. Look at this. What? Oh, this is how you... This is where you bake it. Wow. Okay, cool. These are tea ovens. So you have seven of these ovens. I gotta go to the airport today, so I don't have time to do this. But I'm gonna come back to Taiwan and do a special tea episode. Can't wait. That's gonna be awesome. On the way back to the hotel, I bought... All this ramen because I'm gonna be doing a ramen video. So I went and bought some of the best ranked ramen in Taiwan. And now it's just a matter of can this stay uncrushed on its way back to the U.S.? Whoa, I was just sitting on my laptop and I heard something. It's monsooning outside. One thing I want to mention. Before I came to Taiwan, I was really looking forward to the rain. I even posted on my Instagram like, Look, I'm gonna go see if Taiwan is raining over there because it never rains in Cali. It didn't rain the entire week. But the day I'm leaving, it's literally monsooning outside. But this does make me feel really cozy though. I love rain and it definitely just kind of makes me feel good. I like rain. I just like the cozy feeling of it. And before I came here, like I said, every day was supposed to be... I see thunderstorms, thunderstorms, thunderstorms. I get here, not a drop of rain. Finally, there you go. Last time I was here, I got these pancakes and they're awesome. Gonna get another one. This is so incredibly good. My last meal in Taiwan is some homemade noodle soup. Both the soupy and the dry version. And some little fish and dried tofu. Man, this Taiwan trip was so rushed. I got here Tuesday night, Wednesday morning local time and I'm leaving Sunday night. And I basically worked the entire time through. So I really didn't get a lot of chance to be a tourist. Didn't get to do that many food videos. But I'll tell you guys the truth. I'm looking forward to going back to San Francisco because there's still so much work to do over there. I'm not even completely settled into my apartment yet. But I got two more trips coming up. One to New York to take care of my Invisalign stuff. And then to Korea, which I've never been before. So that should be a lot of fun. And I got a surprise for you guys on that trip as well. Well, that's it for my Taiwan trip. Thank you so much for following along. See you later.