Our Formal Tea Service

While exploring (apparently the wrong area) I came upon this cute little place that could have been a tea shop or a restaurant…I’m illiterate here so it really could have been anything.  I saw tea settings on the tables and a menu area...I am getting good at guessing!  I wanted to go there so I drug Adam there for dinner (I figured even if it was a tea place they had to serve some sort of food).  There was a girl that spoke English and told us they only served tea.  We stayed anyway and it ended up being really cool!  The girl taught us the proper way to serve tea and the Chinese name for each tool she used.  She liked being able to practice her English and she taught us lots of phrases in Chinese.  We exchanged phone numbers (she put her name in Chinese Characters in my phone)…so we now have another friend in the country that we can talk to! 

Talking to her makes me look at my own education and my lack of ability to speak any other language.  I am not the kind of person that has regrets but I am almost embarrassed not that I don’t know how to speak Chinese (I mean who could have told me as a freshman in high school that I should learn Chinese) but that I didn’t put forth enough effort to even learn Spanish.  Here we are foreigners in China and the only way we can speak to people is if they speak our language.  We have a tutor that will start next week sometime but I don’t want to be “that American” that is unwilling to learn other cultures or other languages because everyone should learn English.  I love that most of the younger Chinese people (under 30) know some English and when they see Adam and I they want to talk to us to practice.