Tea, Ceramics, & Mahjong

Days: 7/21
Teas: 16

Day 4

Today was all about tea! First we visited a water treatment station and learned about the area's water monitoring before it goes to source Taipei. To keep the water clean the only plant allowed to be grown is tea so we also saw a tea farm. As we walked by the rows of tea plants we also saw a bunch of other plants like squash and a relative of coffee, a bunch of cool bees, and a couple of students taking measurements in the river. 

For lunch we went to Pinglin Old street with NTU students and had tea oil noodles and a really good preserved radish omelette. I immediately asked what its name was and how to make it so that I could see if I could try to make it when I got back to Seattle. The NTU students were really surprised by that and said that is something they wouldn’t really do. 

The Pinglin Tea museum had samples of tea and the coolest exhibits with RFID chips in some dishes so that they could be hovered over a sensor for an interactive screen. The approach to the museum was a lot more interactive that many museums I’ve seen before, it was very engaging. My favorite was a table with a cow figurine for each allotted cow a royal court member had based on their status. 

I went to Xing Fu Tang in Ximen district at night to see how the brown sugar boba tea measured up to the XFT in Seattle. Predictably, it was better. 

Day 5

The National Palace Museum had some of the most beautiful artifacts I’ve seen in a museum. I do not typically have guided tours, but I really enjoyed ours because some of the details and backstory for the artifacts are things I would have missed or not been able to fully understand due to lack of cultural context. The spinning vase X-ray was particularly interesting because it highlighted the design, engineering, and craft that went into it to create something no one would have anticipated of the time. 

I had the best beef noodle soup for lunch with a milk tea and explored the mythical creatures special exhibit. It covered not only creatures I would associate with Taiwanese and Chinese culture but also from Hinduism and Shintoism influences. 

Our group explored a few cute shops inYongkang area and ended up at a print shop that had every type of paper imaginable. When we asked questions about potentially getting something printed you could tell that they took their craft very seriously and had even more questions for us about the outcome we wanted. After, we went back to NTU campus and worked on our project with a brief interlude for a very pretty sunset. I think it must be a good break for design students when they are grinding on their projects in the evening.

Day 6 

The Yingge Ceramics Museum had the most modern art pieces we’ve seen so far and it was an interesting contrast to the history of ceramics they had on lower floors. I was particularly unnerved by these little ceramic sushi people with creepy heads. 

The tour of the Tai Hwa pottery studio reminded me of a tour I went on in a Delftware workshop in the Netherlands. The precision of the artists was amazing. My creation was much less precise. I drew inspiration from my favorite ceramics pieces both from the ceramics museum and also the National Palace Museum and ended up with a design that I loved, but I was only able to finish the plate so I ended up with a very minimal cup. 

We had a meat floss rice roll for lunch so we could rally for the project critique. And then we had milk tea for emotional support so that we could rally after the project critique and continue working on our Mahjong Mentor project.

Day 7

Our last day with the NTU students started with many good presentations from our program and interesting suggestions from the judge panel. I loved hearing their interpretations of our designs through their lived experience of designing in Taiwan because that was the hardest thing to include in our design with the limited time we had spent here. Our farewell to NTU was full of gifts from both sides! 

To wrap up the day I ended up with a tea latte, a oolong tea cocktail, chazuke (tea rice soup), honey oolong tea, and TEArimisu over the course of an afternoon while it downpoured.