Tea for two hundred

When there is something to celebrate at my company HQ here, they have a "tea party". Forget about whatever connotations that has for you. The celebration could be for someone leaving the group, having a baby, etc. They buy tea for everyone, which is usually some kind of cold flavored tea. It could be bubble tea but it usually isn't. In addition there's some kind of snack food, similar to what you might find in a night market. It's really a small meal, served at 3:30 in the afternoon. It throws off my eating schedule a bit, but I have to at least try a little of whatever it is to be polite. Plus hey, free food. In typical Taiwanese fashion, there's no real etiquette. Show up whenever you think the food will be there, grab some, stick around or not. I always try to thank the guy who bought, but sometimes we don't even know who it is.

This week they held a huge tea party for our entire division, which employs something like 1000 people here in Hsinchu. Now the next level of celebration requires a lot more stuff. You need an emcee with background music, a few people dressed up in commemorative t-shirts, with graphics that matched the posters and giveaways. They had a giant inflatable pink heart for some reason. Everyone got a box with about 6 different desserts in it. It was quite the production. I wish I had some idea what we were celebrating. My colleagues couldn't figure it out. We were sitting in a location with pretty poor acoustics and they couldn't understand the speakers. There was some kind of a caterpillar theme...like the division has gone through the larval stage and become a butterfly, maybe? Come to think of it, there wasn't even any tea.