Russian Word of the Day

The Russian word for tea is чай. Russians drink a lot of hot tea, even when it's hot out. They seem to have this theory that if you drink hot tea, then you sweat, and sweat cools you down, so drinking hot tea cools you down. Don't try to argue with the logic of that. They won't buy it.

In the States if you ask someone under 30 how to make tea, they will probably tell you something like: "Put the teabag (чайный пакетик) in the cup (чашка). Pour in boiling water (кипяток). When the water changes color, pull the teabag out." If they are tea experts, they might add, "Pull out the teabag as soon as the water changes color or the tea will turn out bitter." A Russian would just laugh at that. Yes, Russians have teabags, but making tea with them is a sign of incompetence. That's right: tea-bagging = incompetence.

So how do Russians make tea? Obviously you have to start with a чайник teapot:

You may notice that the teapot is not the same thing as an American tea kettle. The teapot is smaller. If you rotate it, then you see that it has a built-in strainer:

Here's how it works. You put a ton of tea in the teapot, then you add hot water. This makes a заварка, which is an intense tea brew. You then fill your cup perhaps one fourth full of the заварка:

Then you take hot water out of a tea kettle which has brought the water to a temperature so hot that even the animals around Chernobyl would be intimidated:

You then fill the the cup with the Chernobyl water:

You then let it cool down a bit, say for 1.5 days (полтора дня). Then you drink the tea. And that's the proper way to make tea.

Okay, I was kidding about the 1.5 days part. But they really do heat the water up über-hot, and you really do have to let it cool a while.