Pizza and Hiking

In an unexpected turn of events, I did some new things in the past couple of days- first off, we made pizza!

The cheese was expensive but hey, it was pretty good cheese. Though at this point my cheese judging capacity is probably impaired by the cheese deficit I have been experiencing. We made some for our roommates too! We being Maia and I, the only remaining students over spring break.

So, at this point you may be thinking, "Homemade pizza in China, how can one top that?"

Gorgeous scenery, that's how.

But first we had to get there. Which proved to be a little difficult, as the articles we had read to "find" the routes, did not include maps, just rather vague directions. So I knew which mountains we wanted to climb, but had no idea on how to get up said mountains, which meant we asked people for directions a lot to get to the trail head, and then asked for more directions along the way, for good measure. We went into this cool cafe(?) to ask for directions.

We walked by this on the way

And we got there! It turns out the beginning of the trail was an old road (before a tunnel was made) over the mountain, and after awhile, it became like doing stairs.

We made to the top!

At each of the mountain tops there were these "helpful" notices about how to hike, I have pictures of them all, but I'll only have you read this, the first one :) 

Super super nice. You can see Hangzhou in the distance if you look closely.

Tea Fields! And Maia climbing up. 

The wilderness!

The trail was mostly rock, and sometimes we'd encounter what seemed to be fairly recently planted bamboo, but mostly the land seemed to be used to grow tea leaves.

After hiking for awhile, our trail started to lead us out of the woods, so we figured we had found the end of trail, since our directions were rather vague on how the trail ended. We figured we were probably close to one of the mountains we had climbed, but then we encountered this body of water. Most certainly not the West Lake. So where were we? 

We were at B instead of A. But no worries, after some help from a street sweeper, we got on a bus to bring us back to Hangzhou proper.

Where we celebrated a marvelous day with approximations of our idea of falafel, pita, hummus and salad. Very delicious. 

And that's it! I need to start doing my homework, the end of spring break sort of snuck up on me.