Quote: (06-24-2014 01:58 AM)Suits Wrote:
Quote: (06-24-2014 12:30 AM)Global_Cocksman Wrote:
@Suits,
Why don't you recommend Tianjin?
For a lot of reasons:
1)While demand is reasonably high for English teachers, as there is in all Chinese cities, there are enough foreigners (a lot of students, for example) that the hourly pay isn't that great and the opportunities available do not impress.
Full time jobs have sucky pay (lower than Beijing/Shanghai) but living expenses are comparable.
It's easy to fill the high demand hours with some part time work, but very challenging to put together a schedule with enough part time to actual pay the bills. I would know. I tried for two years.
Hard to get jobs that pay more than what they were paying a decade ago (150 RMB), which is a ridiculous low rate, consider how much more expensive China has become in the last decade.
2) The people are extra corrupt and dishonest, more so than most Chinese cities. Chinese people everywhere dislike Tianjiners. Expect to get ripped off constantly in Tianjin.
3) While 15 years ago, Tianjin had a beautiful part of town with Europe buildings from it's days as a trade concession, they have managed this area poorly and the city is just downright ugly and dirty for the most part.
4) While it isn't terrible, the entertainment opportunities for foreigners are much more limited than Beijing and Shanghai. When I lived there, there were only two clubs that were foreigner friendly and I'm not confident that they are both open any more. Only one had a reasonably sized dance floor. The other was way too crowded.
While in Beijing and Shanghai there are tons of restaurants that specialize in very tasty Western food (and other international cuisines), Tianjin doesn't have enough foreigners to justify good quality international food and the local Chinese are stupid morons who have no taste. Therefore, most restaurants specializing in Western food either taste worse than the food you probably cook at home yourself or are exorbitantly expensive.
It's really hard just to find a good burger. So hard, in fact, that on restaurant actually has my recipe on the menu, because I complained to the owner about the previous burger that they were selling and taught him how to cook one properly.
Oddly enough, that same restaurant makes a great steak.
In Beijing, it really isn't hard to find a good burger, because there is enough demand for good food that the sucky places go out of business.
In Tianjin, the locals are the main source of business and they are so poorly educated that they can't tell the difference between good and bad Western food.
Chinese food, however, is very impressive. If you are there, I recommend any restaurant specializing in DongBei cuisine.
5) Ugly girls with armpit hair.
6) There are three respectable subway lines, but two of them only opened in 2012. Before that, there was just one line for decades. It takes a long time to make infrastructure developments happen, because the local government is much more corrupt than average for China. They syphon off a lot of money for secret personal retirement accounts.
As a result, traffic is pretty pathetic. With an e-bike, this can be mitigated, but compared to the subway system in Beijing, Tianjin is just downright embarrassing.
Long story short, any thing you might like about Tianjin is going to be even better in Beijing. The only advantage of Tianjin is that it is smaller and most places can be reached in about 30 minutes, if you aren't driving a car in rush hour traffic, taking a taxi or a bus. In Beijing, by comparison, it can take one or two hours to get to a lot of places.
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How's the visa situation? Specially for work and or biz visa for Canadians?
It helps to have a completed four year bachelors degree. Otherwise, there are no guarantees. Things have gotten a lot stricter.
That's hilarious. Every time I come back from China, I always get a 1/2 to a 3/4 pound cheeseburger immediately after leaving the airport, then get mesquite smoked barbeque after that meal digests.
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