Learn the DO's and DON'Ts of living in Shanghai through our Living Tips blog. We have the best advice online about living and traveling in this vibrant city.
Restaurant Tips
- Always ask for receipts and invoices when you eat in restaurants, and scratch the silver part-lottery, you may get surprised sometime, I did:)
- Remind the waiter/waitress not to put MSG in the food.
- If you are vegetarian, when you order some veggies make sure to ask if it has lard in it, and ask us, we know good vegetarian restaurants.
- Make sure menus at restaurants have prices.
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Traveling Tips
- Always take the light blue or yellow taxis, they rarely cheat you, and make sure you always get the receipts, and pay some attention to the driver's appearance and his/her work ID just in case you forget something.
- Do not take 'black taxi'-illegal ones.
- Always prepare some food before you go to some places of interest, if you don't like paying good money for crappy food.
- Buy tickets from offices not individuals.
- Do not always give money to those beggars, instead of helping the poor, you might be helping the beggar industry to grow.
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Shopping Tips
- Do not buy any 'watches, bags' from those street sellers who claim they have designer stuffs, if you are interested in fake designer stuffs, there are certain places for them, ask us, we can arrange people to take you shopping there and get best prices.
- Weigh your cellphone before you buy from street merchants.
- If you are not good at bargaining, buy food from supermarket instead of open air market.
- When getting change from someone, check bills to make sure they aren’t broken or ripped or otherwise unusable.
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Safety Tips
- Call 110 anytime if you feel you are being threatened or in danger.
- Be sure to zip your purse/bag/pocket and be cautious when you are in crowded places, such as subway, bus, market, mall, etc..
- Do not carry passport around when it is not necessary, if you have to, put them at the safest place.
- Foreigners can not get license for gas scooters, so if you are not willing to deal with police, bicycle or electrical scooter would be a better choice.
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Mandarin Learning Tips
- Try this if you want to learn more vocabularies without sitting down and spending a lot of time on them: buy a pack of posters, write down everything you have in your home in Chinese and pinyin, then apply to where they belong to, messy but cute.
- Buy some not too hard comic books to read, they help a lot and much easier to understand with pictures, try One Piece, very interesting.
- Try watch some Chinese cartoons with subtitles, kid's stuff, but they speak quite clear and slow.
- Above are all self-learning/improving tips, if you are starting with zero, we will find you a good school/tutor.
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Apartment Renting Tips
- Agency fee is a one time fee, paid by percentage of the monthly rent, 30% is going rate.
- You will probably be required to pay 3 months rent in advance with 1 month rent as deposit, do not agree to pay more than that.
- Be sure you read the contract carefully-every detail before you sign it-Very important.
- It is really complicated especially when you don't speak/read the language, try our service, we will deal with it for you.
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Dating Tips
- If you are tired of living alone in Shanghai and want to settle down to have a family, we have a good place for you to go, Ren Min Park at people's square! All kinds of people, and guess what, you can even meet the parents right away, what a plus!-ha,just kidding, but the place is real, you may want to check it out sometimes.
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Maid Tips
- Try to be there when your maid is working for you, unless you think your maid is trustworthy.
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Laws & Regulations
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