My next stop was a stay in one of the outlying communities of Luipanshui, a city in the Guizhou province. This was one of my favorite parts of my trip, even if my hotel only had electricity when the sun went down and no hot water. The people in this area were all unbelievably friendly, and always eager interact with the laowai, a neutral term used to describe foreigners similar to the Spanish word gringo. These villagers didn’t have many nice things such as televisions or cars, but they kept themselves happy with some of life’s simpler pleasures.

During my four-day stay in Luipanshui, I lived the life of a typical young man that just finished school. My day consisted of going to the fields during the day where tobacco and tea were grown with the owner of the farm, followed by a friendly game of basketball with some of the locals at the nearby lower school. After it started to get dark, I would head back to my hotel where dinner had already been prepared, and after dinner the men enjoy sitting around and playing drinking games with beer or the Chinese rice wine known as baijui. Baijui is a drink that has an alcohol content similar to most liquors in the United States, and the men drink it using a bowl and spoon to delineate how much each person gets. The drinking games are usually played with cards, and are fairly simple to pick up. Usually no chasers were provided for this drink that resembles rubbing alcohol in many ways, but sometimes during heavy sessions the Chinese like to chase it with warm walnut milk.

Luipanshui is where I ate the strangest cuisine. The popular dishes in the community where I stayed included dog, snake, chicken feet, and beef, all of which the locals love. Dog wasn’t as bad as it sounds, it tasted like a salty, chewier beef, and snake had the consistency of beef jerky. Chicken feet were a little less appetizing because of the crunchy tendons in the toes that would snap with every chew. Overall, I would love to visit a village like that one again at some point in my life, but after being exposed to so many great things in the world, I think that living there would get rather dull after awhile.