[MidWest]

(05-17-2014 07:59 PM)BadWolf Wrote:  

Come to China only as a last resort. If you have a real degree from a real university, there are 100's of other BETTER options. I would love to tell you and forum just half of the wonderful things that happen here but likely I'd be jepordizing my wife's future immigration. So suffice to say there are much nicer places on the planet. Bangkok pays a bit less but the quality of life is 10 times better and they still have clean water. You have to be very careful what you say about China on the net, someone is always reading your posts and going through your emails, sounds ideal right.

Have you ever seen black or grey water before and I don't mean sludge or anything just in general? Sometimes the water is multicoloured... frequently the water smells of rotting fruit or garbage, I'm not sure which and you have to take a shower each day. I'm used to smelling faintly of rot though. Oh yes Guangzhou is famous for three : flying cockroaches, black centipedes and black mold. You will need to invest in an air cleaner for your apartment for 500 to 1000 dollars, they are very important not just for the 2.5's but also everything else that is floating around in the air. I have to change filters every 4 months because black dust is caked on my cleaner.

Cantonese are also some of the most arrogant people in China, both my friends, wife and I all agree on this. If you go to buy something, they will qoute you the usual foreigner price but when you bargain they will tell you point blank, to "get lost" or just wave you off. Up north, at least, they will bargain and work for your business, here they don't care. Infact most people here simply don't care about anything, by product of enormous wealth. Good luck trying to locate an apartment, I was told in one place by a particularily arrogant woman: "I have children in Canada but I have no desire to let a Canadian stay in my apartment". This while we were looking through rentals. More often than not, the agent will phone and people will just flat out refuse a foreigner. You will end up staying in a dump, they'd much rather have a Chinese who throws chicken bones under the couch then an ultra clean foreigner, this is the extent of blatant racism present in Guangzhou. You are only going to get the apartments that they are having a really hard time renting. If the people seem really genuine and smile at you alot, you can pretty much be guarnteed they secretly hate you. It's always funny to call them out when they are doing this. If you like being stared at like an ugly panda you should definetely take the subway, when I hold my wife's hand, I get stink eye from the locals. Anytime my wife tries to ask a local person for directions they just wave her off... I have one very good Chinese friend from here and he is leaving with his wife, for America in 4 months. At one point my wife and I were at a night club and I was up dancing on a podium, This Chinese guy and his friends come up to me, smile and shake my hand, telling me they like my dancing, then when I wasn't looking, they grab my wife and try to pull her out of the club, they were yelling something about her being a race traitor. Luckily I had an American friend and his wife standing nearby, suffice to say that my wife hates going to nightclubs now.

The north is so great in some places that you can't see across the street, fact. We stay here because this is the last bastion of clean air where the jobs are still plentiful. If my wife and I could leave together, I would be gone tommorow. If you must come to China, do not choose Guangzhou or Shenzhen as places to look for women, all you will find is spoiled tarts. Xinjiang is the place to hit if you are looking for quality, more specifically Urumqi. Look man, if you want to meet a decent woman, you are gonna need to go out into the 'countryside' areas and right now those places are nearly 10 to 1, men to women. My wife is nervous going back to her home town because she says the ratio of men in the town is so high that every woman, even the married girls are getting bombarded with offers 'for a better life'. There is something called a BRIDE PRICE here which is a set amount of money you must pay to 'wed' the woman. Right now the cheapest one is in LANZHOU and that runs for about $10k USD, so as you can imagine, women are beginning to have these enormous entitlement complexes. This is not the China of 10/20 or 30 years ago.

Anyway, if you do decide to come, despite all of this, I can take you to a great pizza place called PIZZA 2 PIZZA. Vacancier Permanent has been there once before already and he can atest to its greatness.