I can’t spend as a consumer even if I tried very hard
With a debit card issued by a bank in Germany, it’s near impossible to pay for anything in China.
AliPay is setup on my phone with said bank card, but it doesn’t get deducted. Payment attempts fail 80% of the time. I’d get prompted to go to my bank app (N26, which miraculously loads despite the firewall) and the payment would still fail.
Paying for things is incredibly easy for locals, but terribly hard for outsiders.
The alternatives are to have a local guide (like we did) or bring a bunch of cash and be looked at like a dinosaur (not a problem – though it can be impractical because many stores don’t accept cash anymore).
This state of financial mobility is telling. While the western world has setup JCB and WeChat payment methods, the average big city in China hasn’t bothered to accept anything but WeChat and AliPay, which don’t work easily with MasterCard or Visa cards. There are countless Reddit threads in r/singapore discussing ways to circumvent the problem of not being able to pay for things while here. The dragon is protecting its nest, I suppose.
Air quality (in Jinan) is bad
Sometimes the wind would blow and a mini sandstorm would pick up in the middle of a carpark. That’s how much dirt and dust there is around Jinan, the capital of Shandong.
The thing that bothered me most isn’t the thick boogers I’d have to constantly relieve my nostrils of, but the dryness of the air.
The dryness is next level. Our 2.5 y/o daughter’s nose bled 3 times in our 1-week stay here. The first time it bled, so much blood was lost that I panicked and asked my wife back from a surgery she was about to do to bring her to the hospital.
On the way to the hospital, our taxi driver told us it’s normal here. Their young daughter’s nose bled just this morning too. It’s purportedly due to the dry air and a thin mucus membrane in young noses. “Nothing to worry about!”, he’d confidently tell us on our way to the hospital. The doctor we met told us the same thing and sent us home with this advice:
- Don’t let her dig her nose
- Apply olive oil in the nose with a Q-tip
- Humidify the air
Just because something happens often doesn’t mean it’s normal at the human scale. Children bleeding three times a week is not normal.
I can’t tell if it’s just the dry air or if the soot in the air contributed to the problem, but for this reason alone I’m likely staying away from the city for a while.
Food is cheap and good
A simple breakfast for 2 adults and 1 toddler at 超意兴 costs 20 RMB, which is around 2€. This is in 2024!
We ate here daily because there was one next to our hotel. The food is prepared fresh daily onsite and every time I bring our two trays of food in front of the cashier to pay, I smile contented.
I would upload a picture but wordpress isn’t accepting uploads from China, apparently.
Another time, we had an 8 course meal of vegetables and fishes and the bill was 358 RMB. That’s less than 40€ for a delicious, fresh banquet meal with 6 adults and a handful of children.
Parents are over protective
See my earliest post: Give people the chance to learn, damn it.
You have no idea how many times I was told off for being too laissez-faire here. I let our daughter climb fences and walk on buses independently. We also let her walk barefooted so that she would learn the pain of getting grazed by something sharp herself, or feel cold herself, and decide once and for all to wear her shoes whenever she goes out.
These decisions are not viewed kindly here. Some citizens even took out their phones to record us with her, as if to keep evidence of our abuse.
I can see why this upsets them. But clearly, they can’t see why their uniformly protective parenting styles upset me.
The only way is to keep doing what you believe in, and tone it down when absolutely necessary, since we’re in China after all. As the saying goes,
When in China, do (if you must) as the Chinese do.
Me
The firewall remains tall and annoying
I’ve been trying to record a series of videos for an online course I’m creating, and it’s been near impossible despite the perfect environment of a hotel room for recording.
Reason? Most of the websites that I regularly use are blocked by ISPs here. Here’s a partial list:
- Google – Drive, Docs, Slides, search
- Gmail
- LinkedIn – there’s a .cn version that seems sealed off from the global one
- NordVPN – this is supposed to be the key through the firewall but the success rate of connecting to a server in the outside world has been 5% and seems basically based on luck
If you run a business that’s based outside of China, or you want to work for your European employer while you’re in China, you’re going to need a solid plan (and a backup).
I ended up writing scripts for my online course videos and stopped trying to record after a few days. Since I’m teaching how web applications work, I figured I better wait till I was out of China to record, because it’s a huge waste of time trying to find web apps that would actually load here that I could use to demo.
Proper dental cleaning is cheap
I paid 37 RMB for teeth cleaning that took 30 minutes. The results were good. That’s less than 4€ for a full dental cleaning, which would have easily cost $100 SGD in Singapore or 100€ in Germany.
Chinese cars are everywhere
I remember being surprised for the briefest moment when I realised Tesla wasn’t the biggest electric carmaker in the world. That accolade belongs to a brand that few in the western world would know of: BYD.
The largest electric carmaker is BYD and on this trip, I learned that it stands for Build Your Dreams. On some models, those 15 characters are emblazoned on the trunk. Kind of weird, until you realise how inaptly named WeChat is for an all-in-one super app. We can count on Chinese businesses to be ambitious.
I can’t name the other cars here that are Chinese made but because I know almost every major car brand in the world, I’m making the leap that all the unknown logos are Chinese ones. Doubt I’m far off. And from my observation, about 40% of cars here are Chinese makes.
There are still a significant number of BMWs, Porsches, Teslas, VWs here but they are perhaps only numbering up to 10%.
Most people in the city zip around in their locally made electric 2- and 3-wheel mopeds.
For the commoner, life is all about relationships
We spent a week in China and throughout the week we had 4 meals at uncle Zhu’s humble apartment in the middle of Jinan. When it came time to say goodbye, his usually positive and calm demeanour turned unexpectedly into a melancholic one, and he covered his face as he walked away, not before revealing his face of sadness.
It was bittersweet for me to see him like that. His kids don’t come to see him except once a year at Chinese new year for a few hours. This was likely the most time he’s spent with people who are his kids’ age in a while and now they were leaving when our relationship was just getting started.
Nick Ang 
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