017 Beijing China Datasheet
08-20-2017, 12:19 AM
Quote: (08-19-2017 10:46 PM)ElFlaco Wrote:
Quote: (08-17-2017 11:25 PM)Suits Wrote:
Here's a fun drinking game you can play with this video. Every time she says the word "grand," you have to drink a shot of baijiu.
Double shot every time she says 'preconceived misconception'.
By halfway through, I was wondering if this was possibly a parody. What a piece of work. I feel sorry for whatever guy she's with.
There's no question that having a woman like this involved in your life would be hell, but everything she complains about regarding China is true. She described the country exactly as it is.
This is more a study into the fact that you should not visit China if:
- You are a picky eater, a vegan or a "chickenburger type of girl" who doesn't like vegetables.
- You have strong reactions to people spitting loudly in public or seeing other behavior that would qualify as extremely uncivilized in the West.
- You can't handle people giving you confused looks when you try to speak to them in a language that they do not understand.
- You have a company handle all your arrangements, but don't like being over-charged for the service offered.
Many people survive being tourists in China despite speaking no Chinese, especially if they are on an organized tour, but if you have dietary restrictions (due to actual health needs/deadly allergies or being a picky dumbass), you'll either need to speak Chinese yourself or have a skilled and motivated translator with you at all times to be able to find food that you'll enjoy eating. Either that or stay at places with a kitchen and do all your own cooking.
Make no mistake, however. Unlike the backpacker belts of south-east Asia, China is not setup for tourism. Not that tourists do not come here (plenty do), but it does not have a tourist economy and tourist bubbles.
I returned to Beijing recently from a short trip out of the country and met two German tourists who had just arrived from Mongolia. They'd just gotten off at the end of the airport express line at the downtown in transport station Dongzhimen, where they planned to take the subway to their hotel. They'd incorrectly assumed that the Beijing subway system would still be open after 11PM and so I offered to help them find a taxi.
Of course, since they were at the last stop of the airport express line shortly after the nightly closure of the city's subway lines, a small army of crooked taxi drivers looking to rip off confused foreign tourists awaited them just outside of the station.
The first taxi driver offered to bring them to their destination (normally a 25RMB trip) for 285RMB. Obviously, they weren't going to have any luck just outside of the transit station, so I had them follow me about a half-kilometer west on foot and found them an illegal taxi which agreed to take them to their hotel for 50RMB.
If they hadn't met me, they would have been fucked, because given the district and the time of night, it would have probably taken them hours to flag down an available legal cap and they wouldn't have been able to communicate with an illegal taxi driver well enough to negotiate a fare. The crooked drivers who prey on foreign tourists tend to speak some English, but the Germans also didn't have enough RMB on them to be able to pay the outrageous fare that type of driver would have tried to charge them.
By the time I got them in a taxi, I could tell that the woman was already super stressed. I can only image how poorly their 9 days in China would have went if it had started with spending 3 hours trying to reach their hotel in the middle of the night with only a small quality of local currency in their possession.