My experience with esims is fantastic. I loaded 5 of them on my phone (bought cheap plans with low data tiers) and switch them accordingly. High speed, no censorship at all, decent lag to western sites, I’m not detected as a VPN user.

Arrived in the airport, toggled, worked.

Physical SIM… Didn’t try this year but even 6 years ago it was extremely problematic to get one as a foreigner, no store would accept my form of identification, I was offline for three days until I caved in and finally paid 200 yuan extra for a preactivated one (on someone else’s id , I guess) on the grey market. And then there’s the problem that even if the plans are cheap (I’m seeing $1/month for 5gb), it’s rendered useless by the gfw. What’s the point of having 200 Mbits of 5g bandwidth if any website that you can think of (including hexbear and .ml surprisingly, I wouldn’t expect that they would block tankies), is banned? Better using a HK esim at 30mbits in 4g but with the full internet unlocked…

VPNs it’s a cat and mouse game that I don’t want to play anymore. You never know if the website isn’t loading because the VPN has been blocked, or the website blocked the VPN, or it’s a temporary connection issue, or today the server is overloaded…

Basically yes. It’s THE app. Now it looks like it also integrates meituan (≈ Groupon) and JD (≈amazon)

And it looks like if your social score goes over 500 points, you can activate buy now pay later like klarna

Chat, social media feed (both in TikTok style and also in Twitter/Instagram mashup style), it has everything. It takes 7gb of space on my phone and I only have like 3 chats. I’m guessing for heavy users it takes over the full storage of the phone

I tried to say 没有，没有 (I don’t have it) to the counter but the lady insisted like “oh give me your phone I’ll install it for you, it’s so easy”

On a second thought I just have noped the fuck out in the beginning instead of my hunger dictate my auctions and thinking “well I did 90% of the process, let’s just give them the rest of the precious data…”

And most restaurant chains are like this anyway, the alternative is going to small shops where the menu is handwritten and without pictures (incomprehensible and impossible to translate for me) and/or they have dubious cooking practices

Bonus pic of a salmonella-flavored hamburger from a place that accepted cash:

Maybe I should try to eat like a local but my bowels don’t agree with that…

The app:

It just has thumbnails of food shown at 200*150 pixels, how it can be 200 mb???