China is a world itself and to make your trip easier when traveling over there, here follows some tips:
Payments
- You can take cash and exchange it in the airport when you arrive;
- You can withdraw money on the ATMs with a debit card (my favourite option);
- Credit Cards (Visa, Mastercard, Diners, etc) are not accepted in most of the stores, so to make your payments you can use cash or sign up to the methods accepted over there (WeChat Pay - recommended, Union Pay, etc). It should be made be made before traveling, because they send SMSs to validade the enrollment;
Communication
- Translator: much better than the Google Translator is the Microsoft Translator, it works really well, including the offline mode!
- Google and Facebook (what includes Whatsapp) are blocked in China and the majority of the travelers contracts a VPN to access theirs emails, social networks, etc (in this case I recommend Freedome, which has a one week evaluation period), otherwise, you can use Bing instead of Google Search Engine and Skype instead of Whatsapp;
Transportation:
- If you don't find a local simcard to buy to have acesse to internet all the time, take the official cab in the airports (much cheaper than the unofficial ones);
- As Google and Facebook, Uber and Lyft are blocked over there, so you can use the local app, Didi;
These are just a fez tips, if I remember others I'm going to update the post, if anyone has a tip tell me and I can updated as well.