Item — HN Reader

" All we had to do was download an app and click on some mysterious Chinese advertisements to top up our data. "

This is the sort of shit that keeps network security people awake at night. I bet they enabled third-party app downloads on their Android phones and uninstalled some unknown .apk

The future business leaders of America... fuck...

6 comments

For anyone travelling to China through HK, China Mobile sell a $15 SIM in their HK stores that will give you 1.5 GB of 3G/4G data in both HK and China for 10-days.

China Mobile have the largest network on the mainland and I've used it a number of times without issue.

This also has the benefit of allowing you to access any site that is accessible from HK (all) while in China.

Edit:

URL: https://www.hk.chinamobile.com/en/corporate_information/Prep...

If you only have a 3G device, or a 4G device that doesn't support the available FDD-LTE bands, you might be better off getting a China Unicom HK card instead. They have HSPA+ on 2100 MHz. Google services work fine on them.

The cards are hard or impossible to find within the HKIA transit area, so you will want to either pick it from a street retailer in HK, or order from their English webstore - http://www.cugstore.com/hk_en/. Street prices are usually cheaper.

(No affiliation, just a happy customer from a few months back. I got their "Greater China 30 Days Data SIM" because I was spending time in Macau and Hong Kong as well.)

Their doe-eyed turnip truck perspective was cringy all the way through. McDonalds is the same, but different! And they negotiated 3000 dollars off! How lucky! And he sent them off to Hainan Island. Prosperity and success can not be in doubt.

"Winston wanted to send us away to a Chinese island called Hainan for a few days during the slow part of production." Of course he didn't want foreigners snooping around in his factory. It must have been cheaper to pay their holidays than run the factory at Western standards for "a few days" to please naive visitors.

Not to be too sexist about it, they appointed two young ladies to accompany these three young American men to the island. I guess it provided some extra incentive to visit Hainan.

Wish the Chinese would stop doing this kind of shady behavior.

To be fair to China's chauvinist culture they would've done the same of the visitors/clients were Chinese. Actually if they were Chinese they probably would've been taken directly to a brothel.

> The future business leaders of America... fuck...

* Didn't know they need a visa to China.

* Paid $730 for 3 visas.

* Didn't know there's a border between HK and China.

* Didn't know there's a public transport in HK and didn't need to take cabs for 200 USD.

* Didn't know menus in China are in Chinese.

* Had to eat McD on their 4th day in Asia.

* Had McD again on day 5.

Hilarious story :)

This is a little unfair, a lot of these really aren't too unreasonable if you are unfamiliar with China. $730 for 3 Chinese Visas with rushed service actually isn't really overpriced, in fact it's about the price I would expect.

It's hard for them to know exactly how good the Hong Kong public transit system is without being explicitly told, taking cabs is a natural choice for most foreigners in a new city. They also stated they knew there was probably a better way for the boarder crossing, but chose not to look since it was convenient and they didn't mind spending the money.

I'm pretty sure they knew the menus in China would be in Chinese, they were just stating the fact so the reader could understand that doing a simple task such as eating was actually a challenge to a foreigner.

It's not crazy to want to eat something familiar and safe. It's good to try new things which they did, but some times you just want to order something to fill you up that you know will taste decent. It takes awhile to figure out which local cuisines are delicious and which are a bit too foreign for westerners.

I do think that they should have been a bit more prepared, but they certainly did a lot better than most people who travel to China. The entire experience is quite a culture shock no matter how much you prepare.

> This is a little unfair, a lot of these really aren't too unreasonable if you are unfamiliar with China. $730 for 3 Chinese Visas with rushed service actually isn't really overpriced, in fact it's about the price I would expect.

If you are unfamiliar with China, you read about China instead of playing Nintendo DS... This is everywhere on the Web if you take 1 minute to look it up.

> It's hard for them to know exactly how good the Hong Kong public transit system is without being explicitly told

Again, it's everywhere on the Interwebs. The expat community is HUGE in Hong Kong and therefore there is a HUGE source of documentation online (not only official websites, but also blogs and the like).

> It's not crazy to want to eat something familiar and safe. It's good to try new things which they did, but some times you just want to order something to fill you up that you know will taste decent. It takes awhile to figure out which local cuisines are delicious and which are a bit too foreign for westerners.

And that's why you usually prepare a trip like this, at least to know how to recognize characters like 雞 (chicken)，豬 (pork)，牛 (beef)，魚 (fish), 麪 (noodles)，飯 (rice). With these 6 characters alone, you can already have a much better understanding of any menu in Chinese.

I'm laughing at Chinese tourists who, after two days in Paris, are sick of the French food and want fried rice, but it looks like it's the same the other way around (and even worse, cause usually the Chinese tourists are old and I can understand they are not used to some food, but when you're young... come on!).

These are the sort of people who give Americans a bad name overseas. I mean seriously how do you fail to learn that China requires visas? Or know the history of HK-China and why there is a border? At least they're apparently not blistering blowhards like some merkins in Europe.

> The future business leaders of America

"All we had to do was download a program and we got free Internet" seems similar, and the dialer-scam was used widely throughout the US.

The previous sentence about SIM cards:

"We tried to buy 3, and we were told they were free."

Welcome to not-America. I think the free data reloads are a sign of how cheap mobile bandwidth could be.

Maybe they can bring back that practice.

> "All we had to do was download an app and click on some mysterious Chinese advertisements"

I'm sure the app was tracking everything about you and selling your personal data. Apps do this in the US too, but just saying -- there are no free lunches.

For frequent international travellers, Google Fi and T-mobile both give free international data roaming at 2G/3G speeds, by the way.

Why does this have to be a scam?

Financing a public wifi hotspot by running advertisement is common thru-out the world.

Hong Kong has some of the cheapest and fastest internet/mobile network on the planet. Using the same business model with mobile data is a logical evolution.

well, it doesn't have to be a scam, but when chinese people do it, it just makes it so much more obvious than when white people do it.

they should probably hire some[0] to run these kiosks.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/06/29/china.rent.white.peop...

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