Need to Cha(t) more

[GuchaTea]

Hi,

My name is Clem. Me and my partner love tea. I'm French, teaching French in China, he's Chinese, teaching English.

Yes, this is our account, if it's not right to share an account, we'll split and create another one.

Our dream is to become professionals, opening somewhere (hopefully in France, but future will tell) a tea place.

Let me speak for myself, I'll let him introduce himself later (on this very topic), 'cause it's night for him right now.

As I said earlier, I'm French, I was born and raised in Paris, and my studied eventually led me to travel in New Zealand (for 1 year), and then China.
I was drinking tea since a very young age, from my mum. Later, I decided to explore more than the tea bags ([oh, he's one of those...]), found a few great Chinese and Japanese tea shops in Paris (quite lucky to live there actually), and started the adven-tea-re there !
Before I went to China, I wrote myself a notebook with all the Chinese teas I could find reference online, sorted by type and then provinces (Wrote more than 260 references, helped with the learning of the language too ^^). This notebook did a good impression in China, more than I thought it would do, and I was soon to be invited in restricted tea circles.

Later, I met Ed through an app, where my avatar was a tea cup (liu bao to be exact). We chatted, met, and went together. It'll be almost a year in Feb this year. I met people working in the tea, either in industrial tea or artisanal. Got to try "presidential quality long jing" (yes, there is a diff) and discovered I lived 200km away from a capital of Ming dynasty pottery clay city : Qinzhou. Less known than Yixing, Qinzhou has been making teaware for more than 600 years, and was praised by Ming and Qing dynasties.

I read a bit of Chinese, but I don't stop to my limitations, I use online translators (Baidu or Google) to help get what I want to know. I read scholars' articles online to know more, recently I went back to study Plants' taxonomy, biochemistry and vegetation biology to understand better what happens in the plant when it's picked, processed and infused.

Right now, my interests are focused on Yixing ceramics, and clay-based teaware in general.

In term of tea habits, I drink everything, like everything, and like to discover new things.
Despite what people say about Frenchies, I'm very open minded and talkative (sorry for the essay). My English is not as good as when I was in NZ, so please do tell me when and where is write mistakes.

See you on the chat !

[Bridgette]

Hey Clem and Ed,

Welcome to TeaChat- what an amazing story, thank you for sharing!

Your English is perfectly fine, no worries there.

Happy to chat and get to know both of you more (and maybe visit your tea house one day)!