This website is for our random friends and family who are trying to keep track of us.

Chaikana (or chakana) means "tea house" in .. well, we'll get to that in a minute. (We would have, of course, picked the domain name "coffee house" but cafe.everything was already taken.)

We picked out the name in western china, where we spent man happy hours drinking tea in a chaikana. Gene remembered that tea houses in afganistan were also called chaikanas, and Francoise confirmed that chaikana did mean "tea house" in farsi. Tiffany, studying languages in Urumqi, stated:

Tiffany (14:54:12): i think 'chai' was adapted from chinese 'cha'
Tiffany (14:54:43): 'kana' is a suffix that means the place related to the preceding part of the word - that's uniform in all turkic languages as far as i know

back to chaikana.org