Right now she is in the mountains near Taizhong, somewhere around the middle of Taiwan, where they grow the high-class tea that is just barely believably called Dong Ding Oo Long. She got in touch with this tea plantation owner through one of her two main Berkeley teashop ladies. Emily seems to be about as serious about tea as I am about my research; except unlike me she also just took the Bar and is about to start a job at which “if you can manage to get in by around eight and leave by around seven thirty in the evening, work pretty efficiently the whole time and don’t spend time chatting to people, you should be able to make your billable hours quota without taking work home or coming in on the weekends.” But that is a little over a week from now and right now she is very serious about enjoying herself. She just took a well-planned trip to Italy, and in the few days between getting back to the States from that and coming here, she thought she’d firm up the Dong Ding plans. She called the tea plantation owner maybe last Friday, saying she thought she’d like to come maybe this Wednesday or Thursday. “Are you in Taiwan already?” the woman asked her. “No,” Emily said, “I’m getting there on Monday.” “Well then why are you calling me now? Call me when you get to Taiwan. We’ll work it out.”

Emily’s Chinese is very good—embarrassingly good, actually, considering how little she’s used it in the last few years—but she mentioned that the lady was a little difficult to understand, so I got on the phone to get the directions from her, directions being both kind of difficult and kind of nervewracking. It’s hard to describe what happened exactly, but it felt like it belonged maybe in an alternate version of Bananas. Emily’s on the phone going, “Um, yes, can you say that again? What? Yes, I’d like to come on Wednesday, and—what? Can you say that again?” Finally I, the local expert, take over the phone to take care of the technical details. “Hello, Mrs. Song, I’m Emily’s friend and—what? Can you say that again? Yes, the bus to where again? How do you write that? No, I won’t be going with her. What? Thank you very much, I’d love to, perhaps another time. No, I’m just very busy right now. What? Is that a place?” And so on for about twenty minutes, and then three more times over the course of the next day and a half. I was looking in the drugstore today for a masque to replenish some of the face that I lost.

Tuesday morning we headed out to Dihua Street, one of the older sections of town that still has a lot of Japanese era building. There was surely a good reason why I was not taking pictures there, aside from the general excitement of having Emily in Taipei and gorgeous weather to walk by. Dihua Street is home to people selling all manner of dried thing: dried flowers and leaves to make tea with, dried beans and grains, dried herbs and medicines, dried fruits and vegetables, and dried seafood, my personal favorite being dried shredded squid (better than vobla, honestly), although there are also lots of tiny fish and shrimp and things that I can’t name.