2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 15

After I came back to Tianjin, my cousin took me to experience some very fine Pu'Er tea. Pu'Er is a tea native to Yunnan province. It usually comes pressed into a black pie the size of a 6" pizza, and like wine, can be stored for decades – the older the better.  Every time you drink it, you'd take a little carving knife and chip a piece off the pie. The tea can be steeped 20 times and is still full of flavor. A lot of people don't like the taste of Pu'Er because it usually has an earthy flavor, like the taste of soil, which is often mistaken for a flavor inherent in the tea itself. But if you actually try the higher quality Pu'Er, the earthy taste isn't part of the flavor.  Similarly with green tea, if the tea is fresh and brewed properly, it should be pure fragrance, and not bitter at all.

My cousin tells me that he has all the relationships laid out with the local tea merchants, and if I'd wanted to open a teahouse in Vancouver I could source tea from him at a lower cost. A few years ago, I had indeed imagined opening a geisha teahouse in Vancouver, all visualized to the last detail. It'll have silk wallpaper in pale yellow, geisha in brilliant kimono performing tea ceremony, serving the five flower tea – a recipe I'd learned from a tea merchant especially designed for the North American sweet tooth. While I relished the beautiful scene, I must make the distinction of the day-to-day experience of setting up and running a geisha tea house: hiring, fundraising, project managing, and the experience of being the patron of such a tea house. A fine experience once in a while. For it to be a viable professional direction, I must enjoy the majority of the day-to-day experience. Granted there will be times where you'll have to do things you don't like, but you must enjoy at least most of the process. And my gut wasn't feeling the passion that is necessary and ever present in our true callings.

People who've gone away and taken long trips alone, typically two months or longer, often come back and report feeling more comfortable in their own skin. I think it's because we become more in touch with our inner self, our soul, when we're away from the old social expectations surrounding us. Questions that seemed difficult to answer before, become easier to answer now because we have a heightened awareness of our feelings.

And I feel this is what these two months in China have been for me. The logical plans for the future such as opening a business or working in real estate begin to fade into the background, fall away like autumn leaves, and you're left with the branches and the trunk that is your core. At the end of the two months, I'm left with one option that I have yet to explore, the option that seems to present the bleakest financial future but the brightest prospects in personal gratification – the dream I'll experiment with in Bali.