Preparation for a Trip to China

We are traveling to China in 4 days and I thought I should talk a little about how the preparation for the trip compares to other trips we have taken:

Example of a Chinese Visa

1. Travel Visa. The first major difference compared to traveling to Europe is that you need a Visa to visit China and it isn't that easy to get. The easiest way to get Visas would be to pay one of the agencies that do it for you but I read nothing but bad things about them - basically how they rip you off - so I decided just to do it myself. It requires getting photos that have slightly different requirements from passport photos, filling out forms and hand-carrying the forms and your passports for minimum of two trips to the Chinese consulate in New York. The New York consulate also covers Pennsylvania and it isn't that difficult to get to New York from Philly by train so that's what I did. I actually ended up making a third trip as I had handwritten the first set of forms because I didn't realize that they were editable pdfs. You also have to be a bit precise on how you fill out the forms but there are websites that guide you in the process. The cost for a Tourist Visa to China is $140 but it is good for 10-years. We probably aren't going back so the time length is kind of irrelevant for us. If you are not familiar with a Visa, it is just a piece of paper glued into your passport on a blank page similar to what you see in the photo.

2. Immunizations. Technically nothing is required, especially as we are sticking to the big cities and don't plan on drinking anything but bottled water. However the CDC does recommend Hepatitis A and Typhoid for all travelers going to China so we got those. No sense rolling the dice. Hep A is a series of two shots and Typhoid is a set of pills.

3. Communication. China does block a lot of Internet sites so many of the applications that we use daily won't work there. There is no access to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. That means that I cannot get my gmail, post on Facebook or even blog as this is done through a Google product. That said, many travelers to China recommend using a VPN and ExpressVPN is the one that the Chinese government seems to allow so I'm going to try that. If that doesn't work, don't expect to hear from us during the 13 days we are in China. So why does China do this? There are two main reasons. One is to control information flow. The second reason is to allow Chinese companies to develop their own equivalent products to Google, Facebook. WeChat (微信), for example, is one of their main social media products these days. You can use that to IM and pay for things, but doesn't really work for us.