Oh dudeeee no way!

So me and @theannalux our trip in December last year was:

🇨🇳 Fly into Beijing (we came from Japan)

Stayed in Aman Summer Palace was a cool experience (now ex Aman)

Then after 2 days flew to Chengdu, stayed there a week, very fun city, we also went to see the pandas, and try the best hotpot in the world

Then high speed train to Chongqing, quite a tourist place but cool for a few days, then high speed train back to Chengdu

Then we flew to Shanghai and an AI company guy there kindly drove us too Hangzhou to check the AI companies there, we visited Alibaba AI very interesting

If you wanna see more tourist/nature stuff Guilin is cool (big mountains)

One thing to know is Google Maps is all wrong in China, because they use some GPS encryption for military reasons, so use Amap! And install Alipay, connect your payment card, via Alipay you can use lots of apps like Didi (Uber of China), many of these apps inside Alipay won't work for foreigners outside of it (or not easy)

Also internet can be challenging, I got an eSIM from Airalo for Asia and it worked to go outside the firewall

Also if you go with family maybe helps to find some local fixer or agent, nobody speaks English (but ppl helpful), so sometimes you can have a difficult situation if you have no Chinese speaker with you. Normally I'd not book tourist tours to for ex Chinese Wall but in China I would because it means you get essentially a local fixer/translator

Food can be difficult too but if you get a good hotel you can just eat Western food there. A good China-only hotel is called Niccolo Hotels, very luxurious, clean and actually great prices too

Have fun!!!!

𝕏 @dhh: https://x.com/dhh/status/2087903552228278677

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