God damn I fucking love China. It is so nice here. Little things, like sidewalks being wider, make such a huge difference. Tomorrow I’m going to the tomb of the second Khan of the Jing Dynasty and first emperor of the Qing dynasty. It’s literally just chilling in a public park, and you pay like ¥5 to go inside and check it out. So much history just bursting at the seams, and yet it still feels so much more modern than my home state in many ways.
You no longer need to worry too much about setting up payment methods. I just downloaded Alipay from the App Store, confirmed all my passport and such, and added my western credit card, and I use it everywhere and it automatically converts to yuan on payment and charges a 3% fee to do so, which is like 50 cents or less on most transactions.
The language barrier could be hard, but my gf is Chinese so I just have her help translate for me where my Chinese isn’t good enough (which is often because I am absolutely terrible at hearing Chinese, though I can write and speak at about a middle school level)
Honestly, I haven’t had too many issues though, everyone is really kind and helpful.