Well that’s it. Another wonderful PyCon and another wonderful trip to Montreal. I actually got a little bit done today once Asheesh found a bug for me to work on. Well, I should have gotten a LOT more done but once again I talked and talked. Michael from Mozilla sat with us and I enjoyed listening to his process of working through his bug. I would ask him questions about things I didn’t understand and it was really interesting. There were a lot of distracting conversations going on but I didn’t want to miss out. I also spent too long working with virtualenv and a new python version manager to try and get the version of Python I needed running in a virtual environment. It meant deleting the environment several times and recreating it and also installing the dependencies I needed. It was a bit of yak shaving but what else is new?
Lunch was provided again but I spent a long time at our table talking to a guy that lived in Montreal for two years while his wife was in graduate school. He was telling me all sorts of interesting stuff about Canada, Montreal, the college system, the historical and cultural beliefs about the French language, and a lot more. SO interesting!
Andrew and I took a break in the evening and went to a nearby tea house that I had no idea existed. When we walked in I was just blown away. It was like a dream come true! Tea and teas sets everywhere! We only had one hour before they closed to have some tea and a couple of small snacks. Andrew ordered an oolong and I ordered a golden eyebrow. When the man brought out our teas they were served on the traditional trays. He picked up a cup with my dry tea leaves and held it to my nose saying, “Smell your tea.” It was wonderful. He then proceeded to demonstrate how the tea was to be prepared, “The first steep is not for drinking.” as he poured the water over the tea leaves. “We use this to heat the cup and then pour it out.” He dumped it in the tray and added more water. “Ten seconds or a tiny bit more if you prefer it stronger.” as he took the strainer out of the pot and poured my first tiny cup of tea. Then he did the same for Andrew but his was even more complicated. “The first steep is also not for drinking.” as he poured water into a tiny teapot. “The water is poured through this strainer and then we use it to heat both cups and also we pour it over the outside of the teapot to heat it.” As he poured. He refilled the tiny teapot. “Now we pour into the strainer again and then we pour into this tall cup.” it was very thin and tall like a skinny shot glass. He covered it with the tiny tea cup and then inverted it before handing the empty tall cup to Andrew and saying, “This cup is for smelling. Smell your tea. The other is for drinking. Taste your tea.” He told us to enjoy and off he went to prepare our snacks. We had some steamed dumplings that I really liked and some tofu rolls that apparently had seaweed in them which I gave to Andrew. It was so much fun! Amanda would have loved it and I wish I had known of the place sooner or even last year! I probably would have gone there every day though so maybe it’s a good thing I just found out about it. I did buy some of that delicious tea to take home though.
We headed back to the conference center and by that time everyone was getting ready to head to dinner. I guess we were done. We decided to go to IGA and get a dinner to make at the apartment and also get food for the train tomorrow. We headed over there, got what we needed and made it back to the apartment in time for me to remember I forgot to get vitamin C. Off we went again to a pharmacy nearby and picked some up. When we got back I made dinner while Andrew did some work stuff and then we packed most of our stuff and called it a night.
Today I learned how enjoyable the traditional tea drinking process is. I need a tea set.