Can I ask you a question? How wildly expensive is this?

I'm getting older, I've always wanted to travel abroad, but I've kinda just discarded the idea because I figured there's no way I'd ever be able to afford it.

Edit: thanks for the replies - I was right, definitely can't afford that

Oh well

@Flyberius@hexbear.net has been posting some travel photos and may still be there.

So I did this process in 2015. It might be different now, just FYI. I did have to go to the consulate, it's huge and miserable and you wait in line for over an hour. You apply for a tourist visa with a long forum, attaching proof of airline ticket purchase both into and out of China as well as a hotel room, and have to give in your passpt as well. If all goes well, they'll shoot you an email in a few weeks and you have to go back to the consulate to pick up your passport with your new shiny 10 year 90 day multi-entey visa. They do have single use visas but usually even if you apply for that single use visa they just give you a 10 year multi entry visa to encourage more tourism. As long as your fill the forms out right, you'll be fine. It's just quite time consuming.

When you get to China it's pretty much a normal place with a different suite of apps, the only big difference being everything is reliant on Alipay and WeChat. Menus are QR codes only accessible through WeChat. All stores only take mobile payments. You are required to use these apps to function in urban Chinese society. So definitely download them. Getting money into Alipay as a foreigner without a Chinese bank account is not easy, so make sure to read up on how to do it! It also changes all the time so I don't know the current scheme of how to do it. Wonderful place though, incredible food, everybody is very helpful even if they don't speak English, get a jianbing for breakfast and go for dim sum the next.

Install and activate AliPay here and get a SIMCard there and activate WeChat once you're on the continent with your new number.

Use a visa processing service, I recommend SWIFT Passport and Visa Services. Every region in the US is assigned a different place to get their Visas processed, here's the map of where you need to go based on what region you're in if you're USian

It's all in person, a nightmare, and you'll hate it. Easiest to just go with a visa processor like SWIFT unless you're in the same city as your consulate.

There are services that will visit the consul on your behalf if that is unreasonably difficult for you, though you do have to mail your passport in that case. Additionally I think the non-expedited path is fairly cheap but quite time consuming (several months).

If you aren't fairly fluent in speaking Chinese then don't bother with attempting to learn phrases.

I say this without trying to throw shade on anyone but Chinese is a tonal language and, although English is a crypto-tonal language, we lack a conceptual framework for understanding tonal languages and it requires a fair bit of time devoted to learning tones before you can expect to be able to have decent pronunciation, and thus to say the correct words. (Long story but in Chinese the same syllable can mean 5 different words depending on the tone, then adding extra syllables, with their own respective tones, can make different words yet again.)

Unless you have already learned a tonal language to a reasonable degree of fluency then picking up spoken Chinese has a pretty significant learning curve for a native English speaker.

Learn how to say hello, goodbye, and thanks - that always goes a long way. But if you're hoping to engage in basic conversation, you're almost certainly going to need to physically point at the Chinese words themselves or to use Google translate.

Definitely go through an agency unless you live in the same city as the consulate.

Now I’m a bit spoiled since I have a crewmember visa that’s essentially taken care of by my employer, but I imagine the process through an agency is basically the same except you have to pay for it. I think there’s a small chance you’ll have to personally go in for some extra secondary screening but that’s a random selection process and it’s pretty rare.

i would not go to an american airport to get coughed on by sick americans