Tea Ceremony: Learning How to Pause & Really Savor the Taste of Tea

The set-up:  you can see many tea sets laid out on the floor on the bottom right, the actual tea set we used, and the two
kinds of tea that we made and drank!

Besides Taekwondo, the only other extracurricular activity I signed up for was the Tea Ceremony. This ceremony was scheduled to take place near the end of orientation, so I thought it would be a nice wrap to my time in Goesan.

I believe the ceremony was two hours long, from 7-9 p.m. in the TKD room. Two older women dressed up in traditional clothing called hanbok led us through a neat presentation of how to bow properly (there are different bows for both men and women), and how to prepare, serve, and drink tea!

It's complicated-sounding but is actually quite easy.

Here are some photos I took of the men as they performed their bow in front of one of our instructors.

THE MEN'S VERSION OF THE FORMAL BOW

Great job, guys!

Everyone: The ETAs, the Tea Ceremony instructors, our RA, and Anthony

I spaced out during some portion of the ceremony - the parts that were particularly heavy in Korean - but, overall, this experience was a seriously amazing opportunity! Korean culture is so rich, so beautiful, and (I learned tonight) so thoughtful. 

One does not simply brew tea here. Or pour tea however way one pleases. Or even drink tea however one chooses! There is a proper way to do - more like perform - everything, and most of these ways can only be described as being thoughtful and deliberate. I enjoyed the performance, and I enjoyed the tea! Watching the instructors do the simplest things like pour a few drops of tea in a little white teacup made me want to replicate their actions, and do so as slowly, gracefully, deliberately - thoughtfully. 

Before we drank the tea, the instructor told us to hold the cup up before our nose, and to just smell the tea. It seemed that she was asking us to gauge the flavor of the tea (because they come in a variety of flavors) just by way of smell! 

Asking us to smell the cup of tea, to just savor it, before drinking was a surprisingly difficult instruction to follow. For me. I just wanted to drink. 

The smallness of the teacup would have meant two or three normal sips. Realizing this made me pause. And look at all I had to drink. And, gingerly, I sniffed the tea. And savored its smell and its taste. 

Once we took a sip, we were not to swallow the tea immediately.

 

The whole thing was a nice pause to what has been a pretty hectic last few weeks. Even now as I sit in my room hours removed from the tea ceremony, I can still remember the taste of the tea.