Milk Tea 奶茶 2

I don’t yet know much about Uighar culture 維族 except that they are a central Asian people group from a dry and starkly beautiful land. We returned to our pickup point at the late hour of 7:00 a.m. to discover a restaurant serving Mongolian breakfast food had already opened. That is where we enjoyed our first cup of Mongolian milk tea 蒙古奶茶.

Why care about milk tea 為什麼提出奶茶呢? Well, it’s interesting to me to see how cultures spread. Unlike Chinese, Mongolians drink milk tea and they drink it out of glasses 玻璃杯子 rather than tea cups. This is the same as the way Russians 俄國人 like to drink their tea.

In fact, it is the way my ancestors 我的祖先也是這樣喝茶的, who were Germanic peoples settled in Russia drank their tea. A group of Mongolians early in the Manchu dynasty moved en masse east 1000s of miles to around the Volga River 伏爾加河. With their wagon trains and ponies, paintings of these settlers made me think of the American West. After carefully looking at photos of my grandfather I suspect 可能有蒙古血統 that one of our relatives way back married one of these settlers.