We had Strangers with Razors during my first weeks in Germany and now nearly four years later the nice ‘born in Southern China, lives & works in Taiwan, went to University in Toronta and identifies as Canadian’ business man in the same compartment as me on the train to Brussels yesterday morning gave me and the two lovely German ladies on their ‘girls weekend away’ each a gift of tea!

(Woohoo! Sentence paragraph in English! Can’t half tell I’ve been living in Germany for a while!)

The tea was even wrapped!

The funnies thing was how he gave it to us. Early on on the train ride he pulled a Thermos mug of tea out of his bag and started drinking it then told us how he drinks only tea and always has to get up early to prepare his thermos mugs because ‘you can’t buy tea at the trainstation’ etc. What he meant, it came out later is that you can’t get good tea (for the most part I agree). So he went on about that for a little while, asked us all what we drank (2 x tea and 1x coffee/tea/everything) then during the conversation about Jasmine, White and Green tea that followed he handed out these little wrapped tins of ‘the finest quality Jasmine tea’ from his friends tea farms.

Hmm. Lovely and all, it doesn’t really look or quite smell like the Jasmine tea I’m used to though. Not sure what the rules are about taking ‘tea’ from strangers, we were only warned about candy 😛

I’ll wait to get my Hong Kong’nese colleague at work to read the tin for me before I try it!

Now to Brugges!