Fronnie Does China: Getting Wasted On Grain Liquor In A Rural Water Town

Donnie brought me to a rural Chinese water town–the Venice of the Orient. We rented a boat and our driver sang us songs while we gently drifted through the village. I was feeling pretty zen but Donnie couldn’t handle being sober for the hour that we were on the river. So he decided to turn our trip into an impromptu Baijiu tasting. Our captain didn’t like this idea but Donnie told him he wouldn’t receive a tip if he didn’t pull over to let us buy “aqua suds,” and money talks in China. Thus, we were drinking in no time.

If you’ve never had Baijiu, it’s actually bad. Especially the stuff in that blue bottle, probably because it was like 2 dollars. However, the stuff we drank at this moonshine parlor was actually decent:

The town was pretty cool. The streets had all sorts of unusual shops and vendors. There was a foot massage place where you stuck your feet into a tank filled with fish and they swim around, massaging your feet. Of all the places we went, this town was where we stood out the most. At one point, a crowd of people gathered to watch us drink baijiu. When our camera guy turned around, they scattered because nobody wants to be filmed in China. There were definitely times where I felt like we were filming Apocolypse Now, heading up the river, our surroundings turning weirder and weirder by the moment.