Originally Posted by
Sydneyberlin
Just back from China and had a great trip. Weixin/Wechat pay worked an absolute treat and they even allowed American Express which makes up for the whopping 3% fee. Ali also worked but they don’t accept Amex so meh.
Mote importantly, DiDi through Weixin worked amazingly well, we never had any issues. English translation on the app was accurate on all occasions and my few words of Mandarin were sufficient to talk to the drivers. In the worst case, there’s always translation apps which are routinely used by non-English speakers.
And one word regarding the oh so scary Great Firewall: ExpressVPN sucked but we also had Astrill and that one worked smoothly everywhere so well worth the $30 fee for a one month. However, even better, our Australian roaming was not affected by any restrictions at all so instead of paying for a VPN, I’d rather just pay for extra roaming data. Provided of course you only want to use Google etc. and don’t really have anything to hide from the government.
Originally Posted by
tsammyc
The DiDi app has a message function that automatically translates to Chinese for the driver. So when I get a car, I immediately tell the driver via DiDi message not to call because my Mandarin is no good and to use the gps location. Future communication is via DiDi message if he has trouble locating me in a busy place. Has worked fine for dozens of pickups.
The esims from websites are useful if you need a lot of data as per GB, they are much cheaper than turning on your home country’s roaming
Oh yea, I forgot about the messaging portion. I didn't really use it - I think half the time the driver doesn't even look at it. But yea, I can see that working fairly well otherwise.
The 3HK eSIM I got from Mobimatter was $13.99 for 15gb and good for 180 days. I used probably around 10gb or so and my wife maybe used half of that. I was contemplating whether to just go with one (and hotspot) or if I should get one for each of us... It was good that I got one for each of us because there was one point where we got separated on the metro in Shanghai (I rushed to get on the train with my daughter and my wife and son didn't make it...). I was able to message and Facetime (although pretty poor quality) her via data. LetsVPN I spent like $4 on for two weeks ($1.99 per week) - you can share it and use it simultaneously on two devices at a time, so I logged in on my wife's iphone so she and I could both use it when on wifi. Having data on both phones was generally useful though, as my wife had the freedom to make WeChat calls, etc to relatives and not have to stay within X feet of me at all times lol. All in all, we spent about $30 or so to stay connected which I think is fairly reasonable for our time there and our needs.
The one thing that wasn't too reliable was Google Voice calling. Over data it was garbage but over wifi + VPN it was somewhat passable. After the rough time I was having with credit card fraud alerts in Beijing and Xian, I learned that I was actually able to receive SMS/text messages to my US-based home phone number after enabling wifi-calling on the iphone. At first I was redirecting all my 2FA logins, etc to my Google Voice number which kind of worked but wasn't super reliable. The SMS messaging via wifi calling (at least, I *think* this is what provisioned for that) made things a lot easier. I was also able to imessage with my wife (although, I coudln't imessage with other iphone users back in the US for whatever reason... or it was inconsistent).
I'm glad I found the deal on our iphone 13s back in February (Target was clearing out on sale) because we would have had a tough time with our older Samsung Galaxy S9+ and S9 phones. Not only are they painfully slow and laggy but dealing with physical sims and other unknowns with network reliability etc was a big question mark. My wife lent her Samsung Galaxy S9 to her mom, who went before us in March and even with the help of relatives they couldn't figure out how to get a SIM card in it - they were saying it's not compatible or something which is quite possible...