Requiescat in Pace: NiHao Tea House

[dewline]

For the last hour I've been sitting here in this tea house, sipping, web crawling, and writing.

For 3-4 years, my little writing workshop would meet here at this little tea house in Gloucester Centre Mall, to read what we'd written each week for as much or as little critiquing as each of us could stand to hear. Novels were worked out here, articles for weblogs, short stories, poems...everything but scripts for actors, I think, and we might've tried to hash one of those out too.

Today is the last day of the life of the NiHao Tea House.

I thought I'd drop in for one last visit, one last taste of their Jasmine Green Tea, before the screen door was pulled shut for the last time.

If you happen to visit the Gloucester Centre before 9 PM tonight in your travels through Ottawa, please spare them a thought and a few minutes of your time.

Comments

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm always saddened to hear about little places like this one closing their doors. No doubt they were forced out of business by the likes of Starfucks.

If you happen to encounter Dr. Honeydew there, please give him my regards.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Will do. Been meaning to pay him a visit for a while now, and missed at least one scheduled meet-up already before his surgery. Not pleased with myself over that.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

His surgery?

[dewline.livejournal.com]

If you're referring to bunsen_h, he's been mentioning trouble with one foot/leg off and on for a while now. Some sort of accident, and I'm going to have to dig through his past postings to refresh my memory on the details. It's only in the last few weeks that he was finally able to nail down a surgery date for solving the trouble. fajrdrako mentioned that she'd visited him at hospital a day or two ago.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Oy!

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

The problem that bunsen_h had was actually traced to a cyst of some sort in his lower back (right beside the spinal cord) that was causing pain all the way down his legs. It's taken over a year to trace the cause; he had 3 hours (!) of surgery on Wed. last week to drain it and make sure it stays drained. [There was a sizeable risk to the adjacent spinal cord too.] AFAIK, he should be out of hospital by now.

I visited him last Sunday and he was in good spirits, but still feeling weak and unco-ordinated.

Crossing fingers that this issue is fixed permanently ...

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

Oooops -- it was actually on Saturday that I visited him.

My badly organized memory. :-)

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

There are other tea houses around town, and several are even good ones that I expect will survive the long haul. But...yeah. Losing this one hurts.

[steve-roby.livejournal.com]

I've tended to avoid that mall as much as possible since getting laid off from Telesat, because it was part of that life and not this one, but also because so many other places have come and gone: the Smithbooks, the Gloucester 5 Cinema, Houston's (although that place had gone way, way downhill well before it departed), the magazine shop just past the food court, etc. And there was a CD store at one point, too, I think -- pretty sure I got Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque there.

I remember when the mall was brand new -- it opened around the time Telesat moved out there -- but it's been losing businesses for over a decade. Chapters, SilverCity, and the big family restaurants have sucked a lot of the life out of it; it was never a big enough mall to be the centre of attention, unlike St Laurent or Place d'Orleans.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I remember the launch of the mall myself. Seemed like an odd place for it, although the urban sprawl slowly moved southwards from Montréal Road to fill in the gaps, didn't it? While the place may yet become a centre of attention in its own right, especially if the LRT schemes work out as hoped, it's going to limp a little for a while yet.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

Sigh. I have been there once or twice, especially since my former job was just across the road. [However, the less said about that job the better; I got VERY tired of excusing the inexcusable (and pardoning the unpardonable) behaviour of my employers. :-(]

It had some good and interesting teas, but I seldom experimented with the wide range they had; I was just in too much of a hurry most of the time.

Sigh.

[liabrown]

Sorry to hear that...always a shame when a favourite place disappears.

[norda.livejournal.com]

I hate losing places like these.