Before I met my parents I had read some shirley mclain books that were basically fiction but I encountered acounts of Tibetan style tea, so I was curious about it. Another Tibetan told me that when she made it, she often forgot it on the stove till the water boiled out, then not wanting to waste tea, she would add more water, watch it a little more carefully that time and then serve it, and often when that happened everyone would tell her it was good to encourage her to make it that way again, though she thought if she told them she did it that way they would find something wrong with it and actually make her watch over it carefully, until they got tired of it and went to do something else, but they would talk bad about her tea for a long time, whether they really liked it or not.
If you look at tibetan mind stuff, its not really a gung fu process, the water isnt just right, the timing is whatever you can pull off between yak attacks and avalanches (I had written landslides but we are going old school pre climate change on this one), and the only people who show real skill are the ones who can rejoin a disrupted process as many times as it takes to finally bring it to the table. And whenever anyone does get from start to finish without interruption everyone talkes about how much of a chinese influence you have.
My parents do avoid talking to some people who ask them for information, but that is because when Mom and Dad give them tea leaves, they hand back tea leaves, they dont add water or heat or time to it, they dont put it in teapots or cups or tin pots or bowls or shuffle it long distances or buy seas with insignia that scare the neighbors, and they sure as hell dont get odd packages mailed to them from Hong Kong over it. and to make matters worse, they dont hand the leaves back to my parents but teach other people that this stuff isnt tea, and they hand little pinches of it to eachother, and they wonder why their results are so crumby.
