Travelling to China — The Dos and The Don’ts
Recently, I did my second trip to China. I visited Beijing and Tianjin for leisure and work this time and visited Shanghai and Suzhou last year. Some of the things you should know for sure:
Currency
Mastercard or VISA won’t probably work at majority of places. In my case, my forex, debit and credit card didn’t work anywhere including my hotels. Luckily, I found an ATM to withdraw cash but YOU SHOULD STILL CARRY ENOUGH CURRENCY. If you need currency exchange, find a Bank of China. They offer really good exchange rates besides being really nice :)
Phone Apps
Carry a mobile translation application for sure which can translate your language to Chinese. I carried Google Translate, you can download the language related files and it will work offline. People in China are super-nice but no-one in China knows English well. Downloading this app was the best thing I did.
INSTALL A VPN on your phone if you don’t want to miss out on your email or WhatsApp messages. I carried Opera VPN but it didn’t work. People tell me Psiphon works well in China. Couldn’t try that.
Also, look at Maps.me which helps you download local maps for any country. These are good replacement for Google Maps.
Travelling to, within and from China
Travelling within cities: Almost all major cities have their own subways. For Tianjin, Beijing and Suzhou, the subway station and directions were mentioned in English and Chinese. For all three cities, subways are very well connected. I did not use subway in Shanghai, so I have no idea about it.
Travelling within China: If you are planning to visit more than one city in China, you can use the super-fast bullet trains which connect almost all large Chinese cities. You can also book the tickets online via Trip.com. But remember, even after booking the tickets online, you still need to get a hard copy of the ticket(s) from the counter by showing the online booking.
Travelling to China and coming back from China: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are very well connected airports to the rest of the world. There is a high chance that there is direct flight from your country to one of these cities. Prefer taking a flight to one of these cities and then going to your destination in China since you can move within using the bullet train and the tickets are as less as 100 CNY (~15 US $). Doing it other ways can get not only expensive but also messy involving transition VISAs and connecting flights.
If you found this post helpful and/or interesting, please do put some claps for me :)
