xidi village: paths

while i was at huang shan back in june (these posts are so old by the way...i'm so behind... i have i'm sure something like 20 posts that i could be making, but i'm choosing to make them in order so the even better ones will have to wait. you'll have to be content with fairly interesting posts from june), i went to xidi village, which was about an hour from the foot of the mountain. my friend and i hired a driver to take us there. we drove through some mountain roads and through some other villages and fields to get there. it's kind of a tourist destination, but even though there were some tourists there, there weren't really very many (it didn't compare to the amount of tourists actually on the mountain at all), and it was actually a very peaceful and quiet place, maybe because people actually still live in the village. so we spent some time walking around the village, and it was just a really cool place. so cool that there were quite a few art students just sitting at random places throughout the village or even out in the fields painting different sites.

first we walked outside the village a bit.

we saw some people fishing in a stream along the path.

this is a walkway right outside the village wall.

more path outside the village.

this is now inside the village.
there were little canals through the village with little bridges leading up to the doors on the other side (another post will be all about doors, because there were a lot of awesome doors!).

check out the canal. and the moss.

walking through here was very peaceful. it felt like we were disturbing something, so everyone visiting was very quiet, and the people who lived there just continued on with life.

there was apparently a coffee shop (the sign in the background says so).

narrow alleyway.

narrow street.

such a different place. i've never been to a place like this before. some sites in china start to look similar for awhile. like tall buildings, hazy skies, interesting transportation, trains, split pants, etc. villages like this are not common sites. you apparently have to visit a small town in the countryside and then travel an hour away from there to find a place like this (at least for this one). definitely worth the trip.