May 13th

After a great breakfast the our hotel served up, we went to a tea shop that has be family owned and operated for over 100 years. The Wang Tea company has been making tea the old fashioned way: by hand.

The great-grandson of the founder of the Wang tea company the process in which they were sorted actual tea leaves from the leaves and the stalk. In many large corporate tea companies use machines for this process and allot of the times they separate about 85%-90% of the leaves and the stalk unlike conducting this process by hand and getting 100% separation.

After the leaves are separated, they are taken into a special room so they can be dried out using a special heating process. First, there is this tunnel-like design where all the heat that is created is sealed off and then transferred. The Wang tea company uses a temperature of about 100 degrees Celsius (212 degree Fahrenheit).

The heat is transferred through these tunnel-like areas to where the containers that hold the tea are located. This process takes about 2-3 weeks.

To properly control the heat, you can see that they place charcoal under the tea containers so they the charcoal can nominally dispense a constant amount of heat instead of an uneven amount which and destroy the tea leaf batch.

When this process is done, they package the product that the Wang family has been making for over 100 years for sale. The Wang family has ventured out from just making tea to now marketing and selling tea sets, tea cups/mugs, flavored tea and other tea related products.

After visiting the Wang tea company, we had lunch at a very nice restaurant. I was very surprised when I was handed a special menu where we had to select our seven course meal. This is what I ordered:

First: Seasonal Fruit Salad
4.5 out of 5 stars

Second: Baked King Oyster Mushroom

4 out of 5 stars

Third: Geoduck and Fish Conomme

3.7 out of 5 stars

Fourth: Salmon Rice with Scallions

4 out of 5 stars

Fifth: Mulberry Vinegar Juice

5 out of 5 stars

Sixth: Beef Steak with Garlic and Plum Season

4.8 out of 5 stars

And last, Seventh: Mango Yogurt Creme Brulee

4 out of 5 stars

Since we couldn't head back to the hotel and take a quick nap, the last thing of the day was venturing off to the National Palace Museum, the national museum of the Republic of China in Taipei, Taiwan. This museum hosts almost 700,000 pieces of ancient Chinese artifacts and artworks collection encompasses over 8,000 years of Chinese history. Allot of the pieces on display are collections from ancient Chinese emperors. This is one of the largest museums in the world. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the museum so many of the pictures I have are scenic of the buildings and surrounding terrain which was very beautiful.