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Zipline posted:Well thread, I turned down the study abroad program on literally the last day.
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Mar 18, 2015 04:39
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Zipline posted:Well thread, I turned down the study abroad program on literally the last day. Sat down with my adviser and told her, "Sorry about doing this so suddenly, but it turns out I could do the trip much cheaper on my own, and with fewer restrictions on my time." I'm really excited! I have the whole summer, from late June to late August, to go wherever I want, see whatever I want, and do whatever I want in China and Taiwan. I went back and read everyone's posts, and there's a ton of good information here. I'll have to keep relying on that as the date gets closer, because now I basically need a list of every sight worth seeing in a country of 1.3 billion people. Logistics during summer is much easier to deal with. Alright, so is this going to be your first back packing trip? It's a lot different from study abroad, yeah you see a lot more but then again, you are pretty much a tourist (hobo). Which is ok because your USD carries a lot more leverage in these parts of the world. 2 months back packing trip, let's do this. Check out the travel thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3415334 Get yourself a
If you ever just need a place to bang, there's bajillion business type hotels like hanting / 7days / whatever with daytime 6 hour specials for 60rmb. And if you want to spend more time in a place then maybe airbnb spend a week in some airbnb house to chill out. Suggestions:
Week 1 You do miss going to the great North East and Kunming, Definitely come back with a more thorough list, you don't need to plan every activity or book all your accommodation, but I think I written a decent skeleton. Of course Kenner can just come in and correct everything because he was the man who actually went across China. Oh and took at 17 hour train just to visit me 
caberham fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 06:06
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Skip Hangzhou it's bad!
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Mar 18, 2015 06:16
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All of caberham's advice is good but Yunnan is the best travel province. The southwest in general is great so you shouldn't skip it. Sichuan, Guangxi, and Yunnan, and maybe the Tibetan plateau in western Sichuan if you're feeling adventurous. Edit: Hangzhou is OK because of West Lake and the bike rental system but it's the only place in China I'd ever had trouble finding lodging. Seemed like everyone in Shanghai came down there for the weekend. kenner116 fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 06:40
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Keep in mind: The tourist visa is still only 30 day entries so depending on timing you might need to make a quick stop outside the country.
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Mar 18, 2015 07:20
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Is it better than the horrible city I'm in now? Nah, in all seriousness, I'd love to just get a sense. Cost of living, fun stuff to do, what parts of the city are worth attention, where I can get Uighur food. That kind of thing. What's your dust-jacket review of the place? angel opportunity posted:I lived in Chongqing for a year, what do you want to know?
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Mar 18, 2015 07:52
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SB35 posted:Keep in mind: The tourist visa is still only 30 day entries so depending on timing you might need to make a quick stop outside the country. And Hong Kong and Macau count as outside the country, so it might be best to have that in the middle instead of first.
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Mar 18, 2015 10:18
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Minus1Minus1 posted:Is it better than the horrible city I'm in now? My school paid for my apartment, and it was in 2009-2010 so I'm not sure of cost of living. At the time, food was not too expensive. Certain areas still looked very undeveloped, while other areas looked like tier 1 cities. Somehow I never found very good Uighur food there. My favorite Chongqing food is dry pot. Chongqing hot pot is overhyped, because in reality it's basically just the meat you normally don't want to eat dunked in oil. Dry pot is really great though. Jiefangbei and Shapingba are the two really big areas that have the most diversity in restaurants and more modernish stuff to do. Jiefangbei used to actually have a really nice historical area that was on this hilly land with tons of steps zigzagging all over as well, but I think they were about to bulldoze the poo poo out of it and I saw it in its last months. Most of the expat scene seems to be in Shapingba, but I tended to not be too into the raw expat poo poo though. Jiefangbei had this bar at the time called Xi Xi Park that had a nice mix of chill Chinese people and some westerners. They'd have western electronic artists and stuff like that play live there. It's all kind of a blur honestly...the city is just so big that each district can feel like a city you've never been to. I remember going to places eight months in that I never knew existed. The landscape is pretty beautiful, but the pollution is fairly bad (not as bad as Beijing and Shanghai seem now though) so you'll often not see the sun. The summers are really really bad, and the winters are pretty gross. I'm from Florida, where most days are 35-37C, and the humidity starts ramping up at like 7am. By 1-2pm it just pours down as hard as possible for 10-20 minutes and the humidity dissipates. In Chongqing this process takes five days to a week. You'll get the humidity just every so slowly creeping up and up and up, and just when you are ready to kill yourself it rains for a day and the process restarts. Winter is not super cold; it never really goes below freezing, but it stays consistently cold and dreary and rainy to the point that you start feeling pretty gross. I have almost no memory of a crisp and cool air in Chongqing, just feeling cold and wet. Chengdu is kind of the most directly in competition with Chongqing for a place to live in that area. I only went to Chengdu for a weekend, and honestly it seemed a bit better to live in than Chongqing. The major advantages of Chongqing over Chengdu were basically like: More interesting landscape and a more cool looking skyline & more personality. Chengdu felt really flat as poo poo and had no cool buildings, but everyone there was a lot more wenming and spoke better Mandarin. In Chongqing you'll get a lot of dialect and sichuan-tinged "Mandarin" in place of actual Mandarin. A lot of people in Chongqing are from Chongqing, which adds to the personality. I lived in an area that was mostly local people, but I'm sure the feeling in the more developed areas is very different.
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Mar 18, 2015 13:44
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That zigzagging place near Jiafengbei, are you talking about Hongyadong? If so, they rebuilt it all tourist like with shops and over priced restaurants and bars. Chongqing seemed cheaper than Chengdu, but I only ever visited Chongqing so I don't know about rent. There was a good deal of Hui food, especially outside of the center.
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Mar 18, 2015 14:13
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Tom Smykowski posted:That zigzagging place near Jiafengbei, are you talking about Hongyadong? If so, they rebuilt it all tourist like with shops and over priced restaurants and bars. Oh yeah, Hongyadong is not actually the place I meant in this post, but it was the place I meant in an earlier post about the buildings built on steep hills (in the background you can see other buildings that may fit the "go in on first floor, go out on 45th floor"):   I can't remember then name of the zigzagging bulldozed place
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Mar 18, 2015 14:20
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if you are dedicated enough, any building is "go in on 1st floor, exit on 45th floor" except those which don't have 45 floors
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Mar 18, 2015 14:26
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In like 2012 I got lost on the opposite side (north side?) of that peninsula in an old neighborhood that was all zigzaggy with weird levels. When I was there last year, it seemed like 3/4s of Jiafengbei was either being built up or torn down, though. I took a boat up the Yangtze and we stopped right at the tip of the peninsula and even that was under construction. Edit: Chongqing's metro is better than Chengdu's. Chongqing taxis are lame. Possibly the lamest.
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Mar 18, 2015 14:29
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Actually there are places on Hong Kong Island, especially in the mid levels area, where you can go in on one floor and come out on a much higher floor. You can certainly be in a situation where your 36th floor (which is numbered 88 if you're in a Henderson property) window is parallel to another building's second floor.
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Mar 18, 2015 17:48
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quote:The building uses a circular floor plan. Although the front entrance is on the 'ground floor', commuters are taken through a set of escalators to the 3rd floor lift lobby. Hopewell Centre stands on the slope of a hill so steep that the building has its back entrance on the 17th floor towards Kennedy Road. There is a circular private swimming pool on the roof of the building. The restaurant is called Revolving 66 but also View 62 but was originally called Revolving 62 The buffet was poo poo but the view was nice and the singer was okay and I forgot to pay for my drinks at the end of the night even though I paid for the food and it felt like I was in the 1980s the entire time
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Mar 19, 2015 04:13
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Yunnan is indeed awesome. Try to hit Dali if you can, although it's a bit off the (good) outline provided above. Guilin is a nice place also. I will be happy to say hello if you get to Shanghai, since I am in a small city 30min away by rail. Hangzhou is a nice place, and if you're going to be in Shanghai anyway, both Hangzhou and Suzhou are close by and have some semi-legit culture / history. If you like walking, Huangshan (a few hours West of Shanghai) is not to be missed.
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Mar 20, 2015 05:21
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What sort of reaction will you get if you're a gay at a Chinese University? I'm not flaming or anything (that sounds wrong), so I'd have to disclose it. Should I disclose it? I haven't wanted to bother people here too much, but this is the only thing I can't find on the internet. I get that it would suck as a Chinese person, but I gathered it was mostly in the family unit. What about a White Australian?
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Mar 21, 2015 10:40
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"If I found out my best friend was a gay, I would never speak to them again" is one thing I heard a reasonably open minded 22 year old intern say.
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Mar 21, 2015 11:48
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Being gay is high on the list of things I would keep to yourself anywhere in East Asia. This is not to say you won't make open minded friends, and there are the usual gay bars and such for dating, but I wouldn't be at all open about it if I were you.
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Mar 21, 2015 11:57
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Chengdu is gay capital of China. Lots of people use grindr and gay clubs exist police bigger cities. Recently there's a gay dating app started by a dismissed gay policeman
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Mar 21, 2015 11:59
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caberham posted:dismissed gay policeman The most informative 3 words in this post
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Mar 21, 2015 12:01
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Is fart simpson gay in the literal sense or just the pejorative?
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Mar 21, 2015 12:22
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I'm gay.
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Mar 21, 2015 13:28
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fart simpson posted:The most informative 3 words in this post The way I heard it, he was given the choice between shutting down his Grindr-a-like or losing his job, and he chose the latter. Because megabux. But yeah, you won't find as much overt hatred here, but you get a lot of people who only associate with 'normal' people, and being gay lumps you in with people being poor, unsophisticated, poor, criminal, poor, dodgy, poor, or otherwise undesirable. For those who are OK with that, probably no problem. Thing is, a much higher percentage of people here are *not* OK with that, so... yeah. Your world won't end if you're out, but I'd advise against it. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to 'segment' your social life, since loving everyone here does it for reasons of romance, money, friend-groups, money, sexuality, and money, so people don't usually go digging. Or, if they do, they're wise enough not to throw stones from the centre of their glass houses.
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Mar 21, 2015 16:10
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Grand Fromage posted:Being gay is high on the list of things I would keep to yourself anywhere in East Asia. Which is ironic given how gay most straight East Asian guys seem by Western standards.
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Mar 21, 2015 17:57
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VideoTapir posted:Which is ironic given how gay most straight East Asian guys seem by Western standards. I'm not sure this is really true and/or ironic.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:18
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It's not as much here but Korea is the most homoerotic place I've ever been. When I first got there I thought it was a very open society since it seemed like there were gay dudes literally everywhere. Of course it turned out it's just totally straight to sit on your bro's lap on the bus and help him apply his makeup.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:27
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Anyone know a good hotel/hostel in Hong Kong that is in Central or Kowloon? Not looking for anything too fancy, but I don't want a complete shithole either.
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Mar 21, 2015 18:52
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fart simpson posted:I'm not sure this is really true and/or ironic. It is ironic fart simpson, I'm surprised at you.
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Mar 22, 2015 03:47
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Cheesemaster200 posted:Anyone know a good hotel/hostel in Hong Kong that is in Central or Kowloon? Not looking for anything too fancy, but I don't want a complete shithole either. Hey there, try hong kong hostel, yes inn. They are more like your western backpacker hostel with decor and all. If you want to pay a little more there's Airbnb and a few other choices , when are you coming to town?
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Mar 22, 2015 05:19
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Chungking Mansions imho
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Mar 22, 2015 05:21
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So apparently this thread covers HK which is a place that I am going to tomorrow and my plan currently consists of:
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Mar 22, 2015 08:43
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I had a friend here who was flamingly gay and he got laid pretty much constantly, but had a hard time starting relationships with anyone. Every Chinese guy he met was like "it's ok if we hang out for a while but pretty soon I'm gonna have to marry a woman and have a kid because parents" and apparently there's, like, a whole network of gay men leading these sorts of lives and meeting up surreptitiously in parks to talk and cry. My friend's experience was also crummy in that he got gang-raped outside a gay bar and the police didn't believe him. Also he died, but that was completely unrelated to him being gay. So yeah. He had yellow fever worse than any hetero dudebro.
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Mar 22, 2015 12:21
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well that story started out dark and got  pretty quickly.
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Mar 22, 2015 12:23
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Actually it started pretty bright. Dude got laid constantly.
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Mar 22, 2015 12:24
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In Hangzhou there was one set of public bathrooms by a street market that were apparently the place all the gay guys went to bang. In Chengdu they just have clubs, but I'm out of the loop on gay bathroom sex now. Also I know Americans who are gay buy got married cause of parents/religious pressure so I'm gonna say that's just a lovely thing everywhere in the world except maybe Iceland or some place nice. The world is p much terrible. The other parts of that story are sad. When I was fooling around on Momo a couple of years ago (though I never met anyone IRL since momo was so weird) it got depressing cause several people whose profiles were set up as women revealed to me they were actually gay dudes and they thought I'd be into things being a foreigner. It got too depressing so I just deleted the app. I do have one friend here(in Chengdu) from Korea who says he feels he can be much more free here than in Seoul where he grew up. That depresses me more. Human rights depress me all day long.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:14
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Magna Kaser posted:but I'm out of the loop on gay bathroom sex now. Well we can fix that.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:21
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Magna Kaser posted:In Hangzhou there was one set of public bathrooms by a street market that were apparently the place all the gay guys went to bang. I was going to say maybe your Korean friend just feels that because he's away from home, but then I remembered Korea is bad.
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Mar 22, 2015 13:29
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Magna Kaser posted:In Hangzhou there was one set of public bathrooms by a street market that were apparently the place all the gay guys went to bang.  Maybe that's why they give up and marry women.
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Mar 22, 2015 14:30
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Yeah I'm not sure what's worse there, spending your life in a loveless relationship hiding your very soul or being inside a Chinese public bathroom for more than 30 seconds.
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Mar 22, 2015 14:45
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caberham posted:Hey there, try hong kong hostel, yes inn. They are more like your western backpacker hostel with decor and all. I will be around in mid-april for work. Staying in a swanky hotel for work for about a week, but then transferring to something more manageable for a couple days as I move to vacation.
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Mar 22, 2015 15:54
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