Yue Festival

Last night our apartment complex had KaoRou (bar b que) in celebration of Moon Festival. There was a live band and free drinks. We each got 4 drink tickets and Tim was pretty psyched about that assuming it meant beer. It meant tea. I was pretty excited about the tea. I love the tea here, you can get it anywhere - one out of every ten stores is a tea stand. There are many different tea chains, my favorite is ‘Tea and hMake Hand’. I am systematically going through their menu; I know column 1 is Red tea (or black tea) and column 2 is green tea and column 3 is Oolong tea. It seems the farther down the columns you go the more complex the tea becomes (ie tea with coconut milk, tea with lime and coconut milk, tea w/ lemon etc). Each column is probably 20 rows long so many different combinations of tea available. You order by size and then how much sugar you want. Sugar can be ordered at 10 different levels. I like level 3. You can also order what level of ice you prefer. I like a lot of ice but that is difficult to communicate so just let that one go. Sugar is easy...they ask a question or point to a little sign that has different numbers on it and I respond by holding up three fingers. With sugar I usually get what I want. Sometimes I go to other tea stands and then I have to guess at what kind of tea I am going to get and many times the result can be less than yummy. Today I got fruit tea ( that part was in English, which was unusual), sounds good doesn’t it? It was really gross, sort of salty sweet, Tim got it too, we were both very disapointed. Anyhow that what the drinks were at Kao Rou -- tea. We stayed for a while at the apartment KaoRou and Torben had fun running around with all the other kids. Eventually he got overwhelmed being easily the youngest of them all. There was also a lottery and Tim and I practiced at guessing what the numbers where being announced. We both know 1-6 and 8, but 7 and 9, are still a mystery. Our number was 624, or what sounds like ‘leo’, ‘er’, ‘se’, I don’t think we won anything but you can never be sure. Reading of the numbers took forever but everyone seemed really excited about it, which probably has something to do with ‘luck’, luck is big here. All in all, it was a nice little celebration. We chatted with a few of the neighbors (not really).