A Morning with Vicky's Cousins

I started Wednesday morning by photographing the flowers Vicky purchased at the flower street a few days ago.

After that we went for Brunch (Dim Sum) with Vicky's cousins Mango and Demin.  Tiger and Tim, being typical teenagers, promptly lost themselves in some sort of video application on the smartphone and that meant I had the undivided attention of three beautiful women.  (OK, I didn't have their undivided attention, they mostly talked to each other and occasionally shot me an English phrase, but a guy can dream can't he?)

After lunch we walked a bit around the waterfront.  This is an area that seems like Inner Harbor, Baltimore, where an industrial area has been transformed into a beautiful waterfront with bars, restaurants, and shops (though most of it was closed due to the new year).  From there we walked to Mango's apartment where we met up with Fei, Mango's husband. They live on the 9th floor of a building without elevators, so after a brief rest after lugging up my camera bag, he started to share his passion... 

Which was for tea (and what a passion it was)!  Fei has been collecting tea his whole life and aims to collect enough to drink throughout his retirement.  He seems well on his way to that goal.  Fei described the different types of Pu'er tea - he had a large variety of both fresh and cooked tea with a fair bit of top quality stuff as well.  He broke out an amount of fresh tea (which he says he's shared with less than 10 people so far - 5 were in the room and one was me) and then described to us over an hour or so all aspects of washing, brewing, tasting and enjoying tea.  Since we were drinking so much (evidently you can get drunk on tea alone), Mango made some dumplings for us as well.  This was one of the most comfortable times I've had in China so far.  Afterward we went up on their rooftop garden where they grow some of the vegetables the family uses and took in the sights.  It always amazes me how when you're in downtown Guangzhou, the city seems to go on forever in all directions.

One interesting note about today... we had BLUE SKIES!  With most of the traffic gone for the past week or so (it started to return to normal levels today), pollution was greatly reduced.