Smoggy Dubai (c) tienshan

It’s rare that I hit on topics here that don’t involve myself, my adoptive country of China or my homeland of Canada. However, I just finished a long investigative report in The Independent about Dubai, and felt the need to share.

The article, written by Johann Hari, shocked me. I had never really put much thought into Dubai, more than knowing it was a common option for people living the expat life.

Hari does an excellent job of breaking down the success and seediness of the city state into multiple levels:

A Canadian in a car park

Karen, a Canadian woman, has lived out of her SUV ever since her husband, Daniel, quit his job in an effort to get out of debt and leave the country.

“Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment.” Karen can’t speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.

Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. “He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn’t face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him.”

Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, “but it was so humiliating. I’ve never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I’ve never…” She peters out.

The Sheikh and the slaves

Though Sheikh Mohammed, the supreme ruler of Dubai with a slick Web site t’boot, takes most of the credit for the city’s break-neck advancement. However, most of the necks that have been broken are those of a slave labour class imported from poor villages from Asia and Africa, trucked into the city from a large compound several kilometres out into the desert.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. “To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell,” he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal’s village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they’d pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don’t like it, the company told him, go home. “But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,” he said. “Well, then you’d better get to work,” they replied.

The Ugly Expat

Hari paints a bleak, but not all that unfamiliar, portrait of expats living in Dubai.

Later, in a hotel bar, I start chatting to a dyspeptic expat American who works in the cosmetics industry and is desperate to get away from these people. She says: “All the people who couldn’t succeed in their own countries end up here, and suddenly they’re rich and promoted way above their abilities and bragging about how great they are. I’ve never met so many incompetent people in such senior positions anywhere in the world.” She adds: “It’s absolutely racist. I had Filipino girls working for me doing the same job as a European girl, and she’s paid a quarter of the wages. The people who do the real work are paid next to nothing, while these incompetent managers pay themselves £40,000 a month.”

With the exception of her, one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid. The maids used to be predominantly Filipino, but with the recession, Filipinos have been judged to be too expensive, so a nice Ethiopian servant girl is the latest fashionable accessory.

It is an open secret that once you hire a maid, you have absolute power over her. You take her passport – everyone does; you decide when to pay her, and when – if ever – she can take a break; and you decide who she talks to. She speaks no Arabic. She cannot escape.

The Emirati Elite

As eye-opening as the other parts of the article were, it was a conversation with Sultan al-Qassemi, a columnist with “liberal/reformist” leanings, that worried me the most. He didn’t seem all that liberal when Hari brought up the darker side of Dubai:

I sigh. Sultan is seething now. “People in the West are always complaining about us,” he says. Suddenly, he adopts a mock-whiny voice and says, in imitation of these disgusting critics: “Why don’t you treat animals better? Why don’t you have better shampoo advertising? Why don’t you treat labourers better?” It’s a revealing order: animals, shampoo, then workers. He becomes more heated, shifting in his seat, jabbing his finger at me. “I gave workers who worked for me safety goggles and special boots, and they didn’t want to wear them! It slows them down!”

And then he smiles, coming up with what he sees as his killer argument. “When I see Western journalists criticise us – don’t you realise you’re shooting yourself in the foot? The Middle East will be far more dangerous if Dubai fails. Our export isn’t oil, it’s hope. Poor Egyptians or Libyans or Iranians grow up saying – I want to go to Dubai. We’re very important to the region. We are showing how to be a modern Muslim country. We don’t have any fundamentalists here. Europeans shouldn’t gloat at our demise. You should be very worried…. Do you know what will happen if this model fails? Dubai will go down the Iranian path, the Islamist path.”

It freaks me out that the concepts of democracy and human rights are so easily washed away under the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. It concerns me that the Great Arab Hope it seems has adopted an ideology of “ignore our faults, or fear our wrath.”

The Desert

Dubai is built on desert. This might seem obvious, but it startled me to learn it has absolutely no usable water that isn’t imported from outside or “reclaimed” from seawater – a process that emits large volumes of CO2 into the environment. In an interview with Hari, Dr Mohammed Raouf, the environmental director of the Gulf Research Centre, explains:

“At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil…” he shakes his head. “We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There’s almost no storage. We don’t know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive.”

Global warming, he adds, makes the problem even worse. “We are building all these artificial islands, but if the sea level rises, they will be gone, and we will lose a lot. Developers keep saying it’s all fine, they’ve taken it into consideration, but I’m not so sure.”

Is the Dubai government concerned about any of this? “There isn’t much interest in these problems,” he says sadly. But just to stand still, the average resident of Dubai needs three times more water than the average human. In the looming century of water stresses and a transition away from fossil fuels, Dubai is uniquely vulnerable.

That virtually all the criticisms could equally be applied to China will not be lost on anyone who reads it and lives or has lived in the Middle Kingdom.

Rob, for those that don’t know, just broke a Guinness World Record skateboarding 12,000 km unsupported. His journey started in Switzerland and took him over Europe, the US and the width of China – beginning in Xinjiang and ending just over a week ago in Shanghai.

My interview with Rob drummed up some interesting comments from his well-travelled fan base on Lost Laowai, including an e-mail from Alastair Humphreys.

All of it has got me thinking about my own travels, however tame they are by comparison, and how much I’d love to do something like that again.

It’s funny in some ways. Many, I think, would look at a person living overseas and think they are in the middle of an adventure already, and for some they surely are. But after nearly four years here in China, I’ve settled into a groove, gotten married, bought a dog and eat pizza delivery – a bit far away from hiking the Amalfi coast, raving in Thailand, camping on an island with a bunch of monkeys, and checking out the Greek countryside from the precariously perched monasteries of Meteora.

Often when I start thinking about heading out and putting a few new pins in the map I start thinking of all the reasons that it’s difficult now and why I can’t or shouldn’t. I say to myself that life is different now – I’m older, I’m married, I’ve got a dog, and delivery pizza…

It pains me to think the words. To, at least in my mind’s ear, hear them said. It’s, almost verbatim, the speech I heard a hundred times from a hundred different people upon returning home after backpacking for 5 months. A speech that always started with “Wow, I envy you. I wish I could go do it.”

Well, I guess my response is as good for me now as it was for them then. You can. I can.

Spring always stirs in me a desire for change. Perhaps a remnant of my primordial past, or just the fact that I spend most of my days indoors with a slowly dwindling connection to the outside world…

Whatever the reason:

Before: Grizzly Adams

After: Billy Corgan

All that remains…

An important thing to consider before asking your Chinese wife to assist you in shaving your head is whether or not she’s any “practical” experience wielding a razor. She was shaving off shaving cream for five minutes before I realized she wasn’t actually removing any hair.

Additionally, this week marks another anniversary of sorts. It was November 11, 2003, that I left Canada and began travelling for five months living out of a backpack and on various kind souls couches, spare beds, backyards and floors.

The recognition that it’s been four years since that fateful day has led me to take a moment and consider exactly how I got where I am.

So, lets see how my memory does:

The Magazines

Somewhere in my first or second year of college I got it in my head that I wanted to travel to Thailand upon graduation. A lot of things got in the way of that, the least of which – I’m certain – being that once graduating college few people have money and I was no exception. However, the big stopper was that before I even had my diploma in hand and hat in air, I was working at a magazine publisher spending my days pointing out other’s mistakes as an assistant editor.

With what was quite an awesome gig for a recent grad – interviewing some of my favorite musicians, getting backstage at concerts, and making more money than I’d ever made – the Thailand plans were swept aside as something to be done in the rather undefinable “later”.

I worked at the magazines for a few years, and what was exciting and fun at first quickly became stale and painful. I was tired of writing the same things over and over again, just changing the names. Tired of meeting the same fake people, listing to the same “new” bands, playing with the same “new” music gear.

Somewhere in there echoes of former plans began to swell up again. I became a bit obsessed about wanting to leave it all and travel. However, as much as it doesn’t seem like it should be, your mid-twenties are a tough time to jump off the ladder you’ve been told you need to get your ass up and have, however reluctantly, begun to climb.

It took me the better part of a year to get up the nerve to quit, and I stayed on three months past that as a grace period.

UK, Europe and an Aussie

I’m not really sure why it was that I left in the second week of November 2003, but there it is. I had spent endless hours on LP’s Thorntree forums and lots of time connecting with various people via GlobalFreeloaders so that I felt at least somewhat prepared for what awaited me on the other side of the Atlantic.

Actually, looking at my apprehension now, it’s damn amusing to me just how nervous I was. I mean, it’s England. But for this small town boy who had only travelled around the safety of his own country and the mixed up place just south of it, the UK couldn’t be more foreign.

I travelled England and Scotland for November, ending up in Belfast at my cousin’s for most of December. Spent New Year’s in Dublin with friends and was on the Mainland (of a Western kind) and in Paris at the start of January. In the 30 days that followed I thoroughly used and abused a comped Eurorail pass my “journalist” credentials had gotten me. Paris, Venice, Rome, Amalfi Coast, Athens, Olympia, Barcelona and Florence were all (far too brief) stops.

Upon arriving back in London for a couple of days to await my flight to Thailand, I ended up returning to a Globalfreeloader’s home that I had befriended (and remain good friends with today). It was there that I met Cass. An amazing Tassie that had me at “noi”.

It’s strange thinking of those three days with her now and realize how short that time actually was. Certainly a lot shorter than the number of times in the following two months that I got drunk in Thailand and blabbered on about her. Or wrote songs about her.

Thai Smiles, An Intro to Asia

Whatever bits of my young heart I didn’t leave at Heathrow, Thailand stole. The country that started the journey, and I was finally there. Everything about the place appealed to me. The people, the culture, the food. Everything.

Now, with the perspective that comes with time having washed the memories a great deal, I approach the country with a slightly different feel, and it saddens me. The memories I made there, though dimmer now, still flicker in my mind and give off chemicals that remind me of those initial tastes.

From taking cooking classes and volunteering at an orphanage in the North, to full moon parties and camping on a lonely island in the south – there is very little of those two months that I don’t wish I could repeat again and again. Even the scar that marks my arm, from experimenting with motorbikes and inertia, is something I took from Thailand and still hold dear.

I’ve returned several times since, and each visit was great – but when it comes to all the travel I’ve done since and all the travel I’m likely to do in the future, it’s hard not to think that perhaps those two months were the high water mark.

A Return to CNN and on to BC

After returning from travelling I landed back on North American soil in the Boston airport. While waiting for my connecting flight to Buffalo I couldn’t escape CNN. I had spent five months avoiding the news that most people busy themselves with, and getting such a strong and forceful dose so quickly left me feeling ill.

For the next several months I lived in a bit of a limbo, happy to be home but unsure how to fit back in. Five months isn’t long in the scheme of things, but it’s enough to disconnect you from your life. It’s enough to give you opinions outside the scope of those that have never gone. And it’s enough for the presumed pretentiousness of that fact to distance you from those that were close only six months before.

And so, when given the option to move across the country and live at my Aunt’s in British Columbia, I jumped on it. Leaving, it appeared, was becoming a bit of a hallmark for me.

BC was a mixed bag, but stopped me from getting too cozy and complacent for staying in one place. I still had a nagging desire to get to Australia. Unfortunately I wasn’t saving much money in BC and so not a month after arriving I began planning my departure – to China.

Eight Months To Oz

After typing various random things into search engines, a planned developed whereby I would go to China and teach English as a Second Language for eight months, all the while saving like a fiend to eventually end up in Australia on a one year Holidaymaker visa.

Though my infatuation with the quirky Aussie had cemented itself into one of the closest (and at the same time furtherest) friendships I’ve ever been fortunate enough to have, I was still extremely eager to see what this big island where the water drains backwards and mammals lay eggs was all about.

The eight months in China passed pretty quickly, and everything was going to plan; got my health check, got my Aussie visa, saved enough cash, finalized my itinerary…

But then something unexpected happened. I couldn’t leave. While it’s easy to summarize these eight months in a sentence or two, it’s harder to explain all the things that were going on behind the scenes – particularly between myself and a quiet, semi-English-speaking receptionist at my school.

The one thing you have a lot of when you’re an English teacher in a small Chinese town is time. This was time I was more than happy to spend chatting with random people, and ecstatic to spend chatting with a bright and beautiful Chinese girl. Falling in love with her was an unexpected side-effect.

And one, in the end, I was quite willing to trade my best laid plans for.

Now, looking back on those initial feelings of what it was to leave my home and enter an unknown world of different cultures, languages and people, it amazes me to see how much that experience snowballed into what I now call “my life”. It also acts as a reminder of the excitement and anxiety my wife must feel about heading to Canada next month.

Seeing my own country as a foreigner is a trip I can’t wait to take.

It’s the fact that there are so many of them that I’ve only slowly crept out to visit them. Much like temples in China, Suzhou’s gardens do tend to blend together. Generally speaking, they all contain a bamboo garden, big rocks, a pond full of hungry koi, a UNESCO World Heritage site marker, and several busloads of daytrippers.

My apartment is a 10-15 minute walk from two such gardens, but living next to a UNESCO World Heritage site tends to numb you to the experience. Regardless, with Maggie’s mom visiting for the holiday, we wanted to get out and show her a bit of the town.

So it was that we trotted over to Cānglàng Tíng, better known in English-speaking circles as Surging Wave Pavilion (though the name translates as Blue Wave Pavilion – any experts know why?).

The garden is Suzhou’s oldest garden, dating back about a thousand years to China’s Northern Song Dynasty. It also holds the honour of being one of Suzhou’s smallest and, with a 20 RMB ticket price, cheapest gardens.

You can get at the garden from an alley off of the southern most end of Renmin Rd. A more interesting way is to follow the canal off of WūQuè Qiáo (parallel to Renmin Rd.), where you get a little peak at some of the classical “on the water” homes.

The garden, as mentioned, is small. You can comfortably explore it in an hour or two. Though not unknown, it is considerably less trafficked than the bigger gardens in town like Master of the Nets and The Humble Administrator’s Garden. This and its low price tag make it one of the better gardens to go to and just relax.

The extremely ambitious project has been put together by Professor Lonnie Hodge (aka OneManBandwidth) and David DeGeest in an effort to help people not just reach for, but grasp their dreams, particularly as it relates to increasing their educational opportunities.

The project breaks down into the following four parts (from the site):

1. Traveling: First, [Lonnie and David] will be traveling to the 22 provinces of mainland China over the course of the next 12-16 months. [They] will visit and interview at least one person from every ethnic group and from every province to find out about their lifestyle, their beliefs, and their hopes and ambitions for themselves and others. [They] will post these interviews on the Dreamblogue for you to read.
2. Free Scholarships: [Lonnie and David] are giving away scholarships that will allow students to study abroad in the UK and the US.
3. China information: [They] will be posting regular information about China on this blog. [They've] found that Westerners’ understanding of China is often darkened by news reports that focus on the negative parts of China. [They] will be putting up information on the blog that seeks to find the interesting, curious, good parts of Chinese culture and highlight them.
4. Money for Charity: [Lonnie and David] are raising money for two charities, Thomas Stader’s Library Project and Terry Dougherty’s Reading Tub. [They] will be raising money by selling advertising on the Blog of Dreams and giving away the advertising money to Thomas and Terry directly through a Feedburner account. [Lonnie and David] will never touch the money.

Considering most of us (read: me) in the English-language China blogsphere fill more than our fair share of posts bitching and complaining about the negatives, it’s refreshing to see someone attempting to put this medium to a good and positive use.

The aforementioned Tom Stader is a good friend of mine, and his Library Project is something I think is awesome. It’s great to see his cause being picked up by innovative folks like Lonnie and David.

Currently the two are on their way back from their first Dreamblogue trip – to Dalian of all places. I’m looking forward to what they have to say about the city I called home for my initial year and a half in China. Be sure to check out the Dreamblogue (and let Lonnie and David know how pretty you think the design is ).

We are both used to four distinct seasons running from a warming spring, a hot summer, a cooling fall and a freezing winter. I wrongly assumed that Suzhou had fewer seasons. Basically the weather goes from ‘chilled to the soul’ cold to ‘please somebody shoot me’ hot… with very little in between.

As we moved to Suzhou at the end of last summer, and it was damn hot then, I was apprehensive about what June, July and August might bring in the way of temperatures.

My uneasiness turned out not to be unfounded and we’ve been dealing with heat pushing 40°C for much of the last month. To add to the mess, the humidity has been so thick that we no longer get fish from the market. We simply open our 3rd-floor window and pluck them out of the air.

Near the end of June people started telling me that the Méi Yǔ season was coming. And as much as raining plums seemed like a neato thing, I was a bit confused as to what this new “season” was all about.

More officially the time of year is called the East Asian rainy season, but off the books most refer to it as ‘the time of year that everything in your house turns green’. I laughed at this, but it’s not far from the truth. Your clothes take ages to dry, any powdered goods in your cupboard turn into an unidentifiable lump, and once you start sweating… you just don’t stop.

Growing up near the Great Lakes, I’m no stranger to humidity, but Suzhou’s humidity is unlike anything I had experienced previously – bar only Bangkok in early September (at the tail-end of its own rainy season then).

Then suddenly this week it stopped. Walking outside on Monday, and taking off my snorkeling gear, I felt the first breeze brush my face in nearly a month. It was still hot, but bearably. Stunned, I quickly blubbered that it was “cool” today… and so it was that I was introduced to Suzhou’s other summer season – Qiū Lǎohǔ, or Autumn Tiger.

Autumn Tiger hits around the end of the first week of August and only lasts about half a month. It is a brief cooling period (by cooling, I’m still talking 30°+C) before the inferno continues on into September. The nearest thing that could be compared to this from a North American standpoint is “Indian Summer“. Though essentially the opposite temperature-wise, the principle is the same.

Back in May, after deciding I wasn’t going to teach anymore, I was quite excited for the summer and all the chances I’d have to finally get out and explore Suzhou and the surrounding areas – maybe even finally get my ass up Huang Shan. But with this heat, I’ve done little aside from hug my air-con.

Perhaps Autumn Tiger is just the break I’ve been looking for to put my new bike‘s battery limit to the test.

Unrelated Random Link: World Clock – it’s just cool.

Recently, while putting together a list of tourist spots around Suzhou for my Your China Pal site, I discovered a place I had not heard of – Pan Gate. As one of Suzhou’s oldest landmarks, I’m not quite sure how it slipped past me.

Located in the south west corner of the ‘old city’, the gate is part of a larger park, or scenic area. For anyone trying to reach it, it is nestled directly behind the Suzhou Sheraton (map), on XinShi Rd. (about 500m west of Renmin Rd.).

Originally built about 2,500 (during the Warring States Period) the gate was part of Suzhou’s surrounding wall, and was the only entrance point into the city. The park also includes the Pagoda of Auspicious Light, Suzhou’s oldest pagoda, built just a crapload of years ago.

And here’s the thing. As much as this history stuff is neato and I love standing on it and going “wow… this is 2000 years old”… it’s all not. But it is. And that’s where it gets confusing. I mean, I dare say there’s nary a historic/tourist sight in China that hasn’t been retouched, rebuilt, or re-”imagined” over the years. And that generally cuts into that “oh so authentic” feel.

But really, who the hell cares? It used to bother me, and I would walk around thinking “sure, it’s old… but it was rebuilt in 1986…” What I’ve learned to appreciate is that when you go to these places, recreated or not, it’s attempting to capture something. And that’s important when it could just as easily be made a carpark.

Aside from the scorching and humid 35° weather, the park was fantastic. Wide-open, not too littered with other visitors (even on a Saturday), and with plenty of nooks and crannies to get lost in.

The other great thing about it is that it was only 25 RMB to get in. It’s an additional 6 RMB to climb up the pagoda, which I didn’t do (more for the thought of climbing a bunch of stairs in that heat, than the $0.80 it would have cost me).

We visited the Pan Gate scenic area largely on the high praise it was given by a friend of mine. She’s leaving at the end of the week to return to Scotland, and as such has powered through every spot in Suzhou a tourist could even think of visiting. Her motivation to get out and actually see this unique place we live in puts me to shame and I’m going to attempt to do it a bit more.

Hell, one day I may even get around to posting my Tiger Hill photos or, gasp, the Tongli video blog.

Living in China for two years, I’ve had only a handful of people from back home come visit me, and so it is always with a great deal of anticipation that I receive new visitors. So much so, that I don’t really care if I have ever met them or not.

Such is the case with Lisa – said ‘random Australian girl’ (please note, by ‘bedroom’ I mean ‘spare bedroom’ – a fact that Maggie was adamant about )

You see, Lisa is a friend of my friend Maryann, whom I met on equally unfamiliar terms back in 2003 when I travelled to London and was looking for a place to stay. Maryann was kind enough to trust that I wasn’t an axe-wielding Canuck looking to turn her into syrup-coated bacon.

She opened her home to me and we became instant friends, and have remained so in the years since.

I met Maryann through an awesome site called Global Freeloaders, which basically connects like-minded travellers in their quest to circumvent the pricey hotel/hostel market (particularly in Europe, North America and Australia). Basically a traveller looking for a place to stay logs into the site, does a search and finds kind individuals (often also travellers who’ve used the service at one time or another) that have a spare place to share (couch, floor, bed, tent, whatever).

I have used the service on three continents, in twelve cities, and absolutely adore it (read my article on it). Aside from the obvious financial benefits, it immediately plugs you into the local scene and gives you a major home court advantage over other travellers. Additionally, as Maryann is proof of (and like-wise my Thai ‘family’, whom I’ve now returned to visit twice), it creates deep and lasting friendships.

And so it was with absolutely no hesitation that I agreed to let Lisa come stay with us, sight-unseen so to speak. She arrives in Suzhou this evening and it’s trial by fire – as we’re taking her out to 100 RMB all-you-can-drink night at the Shamrock. She’ll be in town for a few days, and as I’ve grown a bit stationary, I look forward to hearing about her travels.

A friend of mine here in Suzhou and I have created this business as a way for foreigners visiting China to have access to an English-speaking local Chinese guide (or ‘pal’ if you will), while circumventing the shady world of Chinese tour-guides (sorry guys, but you know you are).

Anyone that knows me, or has been reading here long enough, knows that whatever my opinions are, I generally shoot straight. I don’t like bullshit, and have always maintained that this would carry over to any business I create.

So, when hammering out the details of this idea, we tried to come up with a win-win-win situation (and please remove any Michael Scott soundingness of that). Basically we wanted to provide an affordable service that didn’t exploit its workers (as tends to be the norm here in China) and also maintained viability as a business.

The problem with traditional Chinese tour guide services

Generally speaking the Chinese tour guide racket is run like any other business in China, and though this is going to (have to) change, largely it’s tough to find honest guides that have your best interests at heart. Because they are paid a pittance by the tour company, guides are forced to create commission-grabbing relationships with local vendors. Those under the guide’s care are then herded from shop to shop where they are fleeced of their money on extremely over-priced keepsakes.

This is such the norm that most college/university Travel & Tourism programs teach it as part of their curriculum.

This can be avoided by renting out a professional one-on-one interpretor or translator, that for a boatload of money will be happy to give it to you straight (as, at those prices, they’ve no real need for the chintzy commissions of some souvenir vendor).

The Middle Way

We wanted to develop an alternative middle-ground. A way for your average traveller to have a helping hand accessing a side of China that those who don’t speak the language just can’t get to. Our guides are generally university students or recent grads that are looking for experience as well as a bit of extra cash to help with the things university students need (late night KTV sessions, days wasted in netbars, etc.).

So, what’s the deal?

Basically, for $50 USD a day, you get a China Pal to do with as you want. And, yes, I realize that could be taken the wrong way – which is why we have very clear terms of service that forbid any inappropriate behavior or advances towards our guides – we are NOT a dating or escort service – clear?

We take the safety of our guides very seriously, and if we suspect any ulterior motives (or the Pals feel uncomfortable in any way), we immediately cancel the service.

We first launched in Suzhou (Suzhou guide and travel information) and quickly expanded to Dalian (Dalian guide and travel information). Over the coming months we will be aggressively pushing into several other second-tier cities (we’ve our sites on Hangzhou, Nanjing, Xi’An and Xiamen to name a few). So, if you’ve landed here looking for a helper in one of these cities, or know of anyone looking for such a service, please let them know about our little site: www.YourChinaPal.com.

Additionally, if you have any Chinese friends in the cities mentioned who have fantastic English and a winning personality, please direct them to the Jobs page. We’re always looking for good people to join our team.

Feedback is greatly appreciated, either here in the comments or via the contact information on the Your China Pal site.