If your planning on coming over to China then I have some solid advice and tips for you. I wish I read a post like this before I came because I was totally unprepared when I arrived! I had just returned to England from a year travelling in Australia and I caught the travel bug, I just wanted to keep travelling and see the world so I picked China at random for my next destination and four years later I'm still here!
So here are my tips and tricks if you are ever planning on coming over, take note!
I'm sure when you arrive here you'll want to dive straight in to the culture, eat local food and do as the Chinese do for the full experience! But if your planning on being here for awhile you'll notice things like the huge lack of foreign products, the rock hard bed mattresses, no ovens, no access to foreign websites like facebook, no English tv and no food that you're used to. So here is what I do.....
Taobao . com to the rescue! You can buy pretty much anything on there, it's similar to amazon but it's
really cheap and they usually deliver the next day. I use it for things like English tea bags, English chocolate, cigarette papers and filters, almond milk, crisps, canned tuna and all sorts that you won't find in the shops. You can buy bed mattresses from the USA too.
It took me about three years to find a website with English tv channels on for free that doesn't require a VPN and that website is called tvmucho . com! When I first found it I thought it wouldn't work in China like the hundreds of other websites I tried over the years but I'm still loving it today! It says you only have a one hour free trial then you have to buy it for 40euros a year or something but that's only for the live tv which you shouldn't need because of the time difference. You can watch any programmes from the past 7 days as soon as they finish for free from their selection of about 40 Uk channels which include all the bbc's, the itv's, channel 4, e4, film 4 and loads of the best of English telly. I probably sound like I work for the company, but I'm just so happy I found it after about 3 years of missing good old English TV :D
A must for comming to China is to get 'wechat' but I've already written a post solely on that so if you want to know more about the app you can have a look through my older posts :D as facebook isn't used over here it really is a must!
I heard facebook, youtube and most foreign sites were blocked over here before I came and I wish I prepared myself better but I was just to eager to come over and have a new experience I didn't really think about it. What I did to solve the problem was.... I used the Chinese app store to download a really bad but (barely) working Chinese VPN, then I used that to download the google app store on my Android and downloaded a VPN from there! There are so many good free VPN's on the google app store but you can't even open the app store without a VPN :D be sure to keep 3 or 4 good VPN's on your phone as sometimes they need to update but can't without another VPN on so if you only have one and it won't turn on until it's been updated then you'll be pretty screwed :D I had a look on the iphone app store and they only have VPN which you have to buy but Android has hundreds in their app store and they all seem good!
I hope these tips helped! It took me along time to work stuff out so I hope somebody planning to come over here stumbles on this :D
It wouldn't hurt to learn some basic Chinese too as most people can't speak English :D
If you are planning on coming over feel free to leave me a message if you have any questions! There's so much more I want to add in but I don't want to make the post to long :D
