Day 11

Weather: Cooling

Activities: APPG lesson, Tea cultural session, shopping

In the morning Felicia, YiWen, Racheal and I went to school first to get some breakfast. After so many meals in Tianjin, we learn that we have to request for less salt and oil so suit our taste. So when we were ordering our breakfast today, we request for less salt and the shop owner mentioned about the shortage of salt worldwide and we joked that we are helping save salt.

During the APPG lesson, we started on a new chapter. Maybe because I had no time to read before hand, I was totally lost during the lesson, however with the help with Mr Chua and my friends, I manage to clear my doubts and understand the chapter better. I should take some time to read up before the lesson no matter how busy or tired I am such that this kind of situation would not happen again.

After lunch, we took a bus with some of the teachers and students from TUT to a place that sells everything about tea such as tea leaves, tea pots, and many things used in tea making. There were also demonstrations on how tea was made properly. I was looking for the demonstration part of the lesson because Felicia and I bought a packet of tea leave but we do not know the proper way of making the tea so the tea always taste weird when we drink it. During this demonstration, I’ve learnt that when making tea, the first batch of tea should not be drank because it is used for washing the leaves and heating up the tea cups. For subsequent batch of tea, we should not leave the water in the tea leaves for too long because the longer you put, the more bitter it would get. However, every tea has its own way of brewing for the best taste.

I bought a teapot to make the tea we have in the room and I’ve only paid 5 yuan for the teapot which cost 30 yuan. I told the person that I’d like to change to another teapot that was 5 yuan more. There were some misunderstanding and the person at the cashier thought that I’ve already paid for the tea pot, so she only took 5 yuan from me. I felt so guilty and wanted to pay the full amount, but my friends around as me to pay only 5 yuan and leave. I really felt very guilty.

While walking to the bus stop, we saw a group of people looking at us and they were also speaking in English. Mr. Chua went forward to ask if they were Singaporeans and not only are they Singaporeans, they are students from SP, EEE! We thought that Singapore is small, china isn’t very big too! I felt so homely after meeting them because it has been some time since we see any Singaporean besides our group.

The next stop, we went to bing jiang dao again with liu li and Alica and do some shopping. Manage to get the things that I need and I have to start saving up! Spend when we are about to leave!

We were all enjoying ourselves and kind of left the two china buddies out which wasn’t a good thing. Like what Mr. Chua said, we are here to learn about their culture so w should take the initiative to speak to them. We should all try to change this bad habit and not do it again tomorrow.