After coming down from Yellow Mountain, we took a 1h bus and headed to Huangshan city where we stayed in the old district (Tunxi) for 2 nights. Not much happened (as we needed the time to recuperate from our 10,000+ steps), but we really enjoyed this part of town because it mainly consists of a charming main street with a bunch of cute shopping/artisan boutiques.
We searched for the tea house that Jen visited on a previous trip (which sells amazing teas - especially Jasmine), and did a tea-tasting. We were convinced into buying $50 CAD of premium quality Jasmine tea….and that's for only 500g.. AND that was a discounted price that we were able to bargain for because Jen's parents also bought a large quantity of tea for their friends.
We later decided to get a massage to relax from our trek. We found one massage place and.. they only spoke Mandarin. We pointed at a random reasonably priced item on the Chinese poster and set off to get the massage (with no idea what we were getting). All in all, it was a good and really funny experience.. not to mention, extremely painful once they started massaging our calves… out of the four of us, Jen was the only one who didn't yelp and squirm….tough girl.
One particularity of this town is the scooters. Many of them are equipped with a parachute…! ….err an umbrella ;)
Lastly, across the street from our hostel, there was a cool restaurant where they have samples of all of their dishes on display. To order, you just browse the items and write the associated number on the order form. Then you go to your table and they prepare the dishes fresh to order. We got to try some interesting stuff. Overall it was a fun experience with pretty good food, despite all of the grease that seems to be very characteristic of Chinese food.
