Things I didn't know before I visited China 0 alb_d posted on 2018-09-23 Chinese smoke a lot. You can smell cigarette smoke everywhere. Its also more common to smoke indoors. 5 star hotels also have ash trays indoors. Chinese immigration automated kiosk defaulted to Hindi after scanning my passport. I had to recollect daya haath was my left or right hand to scan. All 2 wheeler automobiles I saw in China were electric mopeds. https://photos.app.goo.gl/hR2Wz5HFYWZg5Thw6 I saw Wigs kept for sale in Shopping Malls. Don't know if it was an exception. Surveillance Displays on road crossings. Zoom into https://photos.app.goo.gl/iBUnQkcuk1mxvEaf7 QR codes everywhere. For payments. For sharing urls. For any information transfer. Date Format. YYYY-MM-DD Restaurants you have to pay for tissue paper. Mobikes everywhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/. I didn't see anything like those pictures but in Shanghai I could get a Mobike within 10 m radius of wherever I was. Baidu has a neat feature of showing the heat map of population density on the map. My Chinese friend would use that in many innovative ways. For eg: to see which place to go to in a new area, one can see the heat map to see where people are concentrated. Public Transport is quite cheap. 1/2 yuan for a bus ride. Didi cabs also cost < 10 yuan for a 3 km ride. Didi has translation built in. So you can chat with the driver in English which gets translated to Chinese and vice versa. Every city park in the evening, I could find groups of older women slow dancing to music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5DH3S8SXZk High speeds train are awesome. Maglev is even better. https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZvLmwdD9u5KkiQPg8. Seek to 2:50. https://photos.app.goo.gl/MTCEeRENbaSgCKrE7 Local taxis have a protective enclosure for drivers in Shanghai. https://photos.app.goo.gl/zhHwadMcZDXnDB3H7. Those drivers also seem to have multiple phones in their "cockpit". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbQ336I3Tr8&t=250s Overall China was more developed than what I had in mind. I knew economically they had grown a lot, but even culturally they seemed closer to US than India. Stuff like no jaywalking. Clean streets everywhere. Traffic that follows lanes etc. Pudong is insane. https://photos.app.goo.gl/26ALPcWav2u6vb5A8 Found Maggi :). https://photos.app.goo.gl/TD7oHs5VyEgbFG3x9 Also found https://photos.app.goo.gl/EJLDPVnoemWvCUMx8. :P Some of the 5 star hotels have setup their VPN connections of Wifi. These are setup on the access points on above floors. So you can access gmail etc from your room but not in the lobby. Gotta ask any chinese person what this was in the hotel I was staying in. https://photos.app.goo.gl/vjBGYi8A2Sb9iDHk7 Chinese movies play in theatres with English subtitles.