#50 Navigating China

It's been a bit more than a week that we are back in China — now in Changsha. This time around, we knew how to prepare for this country that works completely differently from its neighbors. The preparation mainly consisted in pre-installing things on our phones^[1]:

• An eSIM with data (the only reliable way to circumvent the Great Firewall)
• AliPay and WeChat for payments (because China really doesn't like cash or international bank cards)
• Didi for taxis (actually included in the "superapp" AliPay)
• Amap (because Google Maps doesn't work — but ugh, what a terrible app)
• Papago (because Google Translate doesn't work on wifi)
• Microsoft Bing (because it's the only search engine that's China-approved)
• Trip (to book hotels)
• Pleko (to recognize and learn Chinese characters — what a great app!)
• HelloChinese (to learn the basics of Mandarin)

Hyperlinks

Sure, the Great Firewall does ban Wikipedia, most news outlets, and have-you-ever-tried-using-the-Bing-search-its-the-worst-really, BUT there are some good sides to it.

Having most of my search results hidden, I discovered some "new" refreshing websites. They are actually not new at all, but are buried under so many layers of SEO-websites, that I normally would have never found them. Here they are, mixed in with some regular links from my RSS feeds.

• Jango: a free music streaming service that offers unlimited listening with no ads
• This page is under construction: localghost's love letter to the personal website
• How to clean the bathroom: Annie's random post about cleaning her bathroom, oddly poetic
• Color Culture blog: this is a colorist^[2] business website, but Salik Waquas also blogs about cinematography in depth
• The useless web: how come I didn't know this GEM existed?

Media diet

• Mãn (book by Kim Thúy, 2014): cool book structure, chapters built almost as a stream of thought, true story about resilience, family, food, and love
• Ne Zha^[3] (movie by Yu Yang, 2019): very popular animated movie in China, Pixar-like movie with values that are quite different from its American equivalents
• Anora (movie by Sean Baker, 2024): surprisingly funny, beautifully acted, an emotional depiction of social class clashes

Miscellaneous

• Set up an SMB connection between my phone and laptop
• Added some new words to my mandarin vocab list, here are some of them: rè (hot), jīntiān (present time = today), měishì kāfēi (American style coffee = Americano)

Until next time ⊙