There You Have It: Even Obama Likes Street Food

This website rarely touches on politics, but this story was too good not to mention: When President Obama was in Vietnam this week, he made a point of sharing a meal with famous food-eater Anthony Bourdain. Not just any meal, of course--they ate bún chả at a hole-in-the-wall Hanoi noodle shop! Perhaps it isn't Chinese street food, but I think an American president stopping by a street food shop in East Asia merits a mention here on chinesestreetfood.com. Read more about the Obama-Bourdain dinner here.

Couch Surfing

"Please come, my friend." So began the response to the first couch request I ever sent through www.couchsurfing.org. Couch surfing, for the uninitiated, is a new term for a very old concept—hospitality. Through the Couch Surfing website, travelers to an unfamiliar city can find locals who are willing to meet up for coffee, show them around the city, or even offer a place to sleep. It is citizen diplomacy in its purest form.

When I was planning my trip through China, I decided to give couch surfing a try. I had heard about it before but had never been in the position to host, so I never got around to signing up.  On a whim I thought, "well, let's see if they have any couch surfers in China." It didn't take long to find out that China has an active and vibrant couch surfing community. Just to see what would happen, I sent out a request to a couch surfer in Shanghai, the first stop on my journey. Within five hours I had received a reply. The minute I received that reply, I was hooked. In the three months that I crisscrossed China, I spent 53 nights in the homes of 30 people I had never met before. I stayed with Chinese nationals, foreign expats, college students, families with children, retired people, gay, straight, men, and women. I slept on couches, floors, and beds in lavish homes and modest, spartan apartments. Every host was gloriously different and added something new to my Chinese experience.

A few highlights (leaving many out):

• One host was the assistant artistic director at a Cirque du Soleil type show at a big casino in Macau. He was able to get me good seats for the amazing show for a much better price than I could have afforded otherwise, and then I got a backstage tour afterwards. 
• One host's father was generous enough to gift me with an old sweater from his closet when it seemed like I was cold. I wore that sweater every day for about a month (I received it just before the coldest parts of my sojourn).
• One host drove me to and from a different city two hours away just so we could sample some of that city's street food.
• Several hosts (or their families) included me in big traditional Chinese dinners and made me feel very welcome.

There are many more highlights and lots of great stories; these are merely a sample.

Becoming a couch surfer is easy. Registration at the Couch Surfing website is free. Once you've signed up, you can search for other registered surfers anywhere in the world. Likewise, they will be able to find you if they search for your city. New couch surfers often express a concern for safety, which the Couch Surfing website addresses with several safety measures. First, all participants have the opportunity to become a "verified" member. Essentially, a couch surfer can use a credit card to make a small donation to the Couch Surfing organization. This allows the website to verify that a surfer is using his or her real identity on the website. The second key safety measure is a community vouching system. Only couch surfers who have been vouched for three times by other couch surfers have the ability to vouch for the people they have met and trust (the vouching began with the site's founders and the people they trusted, and spread from there). The best safety measure, of course, is that you are never under any obligation to host a person who wants to stay in your home. You can judge from the person's request and profile page (including reviews from other members) whether or not you feel comfortable hosting him or her. For more about couch surfing safely, visit www.couchsurfing.org/safety.

Speaking from personal experience, couch surfing is an exciting way to interact with people of different cultures. As a solo traveler, the free accommodation was nice, but the opportunity to learn about a new city from a local was priceless. My book (and this website) are 100 times richer because of the local knowledge shared with me by my hosts and their families. I joined the community on a whim. That was, perhaps, the best whim-based decision I ever made.

Note: This article previously appeared, slightly modified, in the July 2012 issue of the NCIV Network News.

How to Research Chinese Train Timetables in English

By my count, there are three main ways people get around China: airplane, bus, and train. You could of course rent a car, hitchhike, walk, or bike, but I suspect most people stick to those three primary options. Of these choices, my favorite by far is the train. Here are my arguments to support this opinion:

• Trains usually offer five different types of tickets (standing room only, hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper). This variety is nice. Planes might have first class and economy, but no beds. Buses come in two varieties--seats and beds--but you're basically stuck with whichever is available on the route you want to take.
• Trains are far cheaper than airplanes (most of the time anyway--ask around because sometimes they have insane sales on inter-city plane trips). Trains also tend to be cheaper than buses, assuming you get the hard seat tickets.
• Trains have bathrooms on board. Buses stop every couple hours, but in between those stops you are on your own.
• You can get up and stretch your legs on a train. If your trip is more than a couple of hours, this is a nice luxury.

For these reasons (and more), train is my preferred method of travel in China. This is not to say there aren't times where it makes sense to take a bus or a plane, usually due to constraints of time or the absence of a train station in your desired destination. 

So now that I've convinced you that you should be travelling by train, you might be asking yourself how one knows which train to take. Back in January I did a lot of searching around for English timetables with limited success, until I discovered China Travel Guide's wiki-powered train searching function. Friend, this was a lifesaver. If you enter your desired travel route into the search boxes, it will come up with the trains servicing that route, including departure times, arrival times, and cost of tickets. Let's say, for example, that you want to go from Hangzhou to Shanghai. Your search results will give you 131 different potential trains to take.

Notice a couple of things here. First, it shows you the price of hard seats and soft seats, top, middle, and bottom bunks on hard sleepers (the top bunks are always cheapest because they are considered less desirable), and top and bottom soft sleepers. This is very useful for trip planning purposes. Second, note that the train numbers and station names are active links. A click on the train number will tell you where else that train stops along the way. Click on the station name to see all of the trains that stop at that station (661 apparently come through Shanghai South every single day!).

One other nice feature of the site is this handy railway map of China. It's not 100% complete, but it does show most of the big cities and how they are connected by the major rail lines.

Map courtesy of www.chinatravelguide.com

You can see why this website very quickly became one of my most utilized resources in China. Recall that I was travelling basically every other day to more than 50 cities, so a website that let me research train travel with this amount of detail was invaluable. I would routinely decide my plan for three or four cities in advance, and it was a huge help to be able to decide which trains I wanted before I arrived at the station to buy them.

Some of you may be asking about how trustworthy this site is. In my experience, the accuracy is pretty close to dead-on. Here and there a train would be 5 or 10 RMB more than I expected, so be prepared for that. Only twice did I ever have noticeably faulty information from the site. First, the prices to and from Haikou were a good deal more expensive than this site said they would be. I think this is probably because the prices are calculated with an equation that uses the distance traveled and the type of train (fast, slow, old, etc.). The trip to Haikou includes a short ferry ride across the South China Sea, and my unverified suspicion is that they charge a bit extra because of the ferry portion of the trip and that wasn't accounted for by the normal equation. The other time this website failed me was when I was trying to go from Erlian to Datong. The search function shows a single train, K2. What it doesn't show (and what I didn't find out until I was already freezing cold in Inner Mongolia) is that the K2 train is an international train from Ulaanbaatar that only runs once a week or so, and I didn't happen to be there that day. Those were the only two times the site didn't give me accurate information, which is a fairly good track record.

In brief, I wholeheartedly, 100% encourage you to use the China Travel Guide to plan your train travel in China. It is an excellent resource.

Accessing Money While Traveling: An Endorsement

Every traveler to a foreign country has to deal with the issue of money. If you're planning to spend longer than a day or two away from home, your costs are likely to be greater than the amount of cash you feel comfortable traveling with. Travel experts have suggested various solutions over the years, none of which are perfect solutions for all travelers in all situations. When preparing for my trip to China, I spent more time than I care to admit researching the options. I ended up deciding that for a three-month trip through a wide variety of cities, my best bet was to rely on ATMs to provide a steady stream of Chinese RMB. Of course that led to the next question: which bank should I put my money into if I want to pull it out in China. More research? More research. I looked on bank websites, read reviews, called customer service representatives, and did all the other due diligence things necessary until I found what I believe is far and away the best bank account for U.S. travelers abroad: a Charles Schwab High Yield Checking Account.

Here's why Charles Schwab is the best, hands-down:

1. There are no maintenance fees on a checking account. True, most banks offer this, but not all. It's a good place to start.

2. With your Charles Schwab bank card, you are entitled to pull money out of any ATM in the whole world, so long as it has a VISA logo on it. This is good--those suckers are everywhere.

3. Here's where they start to distinguish themselves. Unlike some big banks, Charles Schwab doesn't charge you any fee to pull money out of a different bank's ATM.

4. Continuing with this "no-fee" thing, Charles Schwab doesn't charge you a conversion fee. Many banks charge a percentage of the withdrawal amount as a conversion fee if you are collecting a different currency than the currency in your home country. I'm not a banker, but it seems to me that conversion fees are pretty silly. Does it cost a bank anything to calculate the conversion rate? If I can check on Google for free, I don't get the sense that a company that lives and dies by exchange rates would have any trouble with it. So why charge me anything to do it? Charles Schwab succumbs to logic and charges no conversion fee.

5. This is the real kicker. In addition to the above no-fee tactics, Charles Schwab goes one step further and offers to reimburse you if the ATM you are using charges you a fee. Think about that for a moment. How many times have you been traveling--abroad or at home--and had an ATM say that it's going to charge you $3.00 because the bank name on the ATM doesn't match the bank name on your card?  With Charles Schwab, the ATM can charge all it likes--Charles Schwab will literally pay you the money back. This is fantastic.

So it sounds good in theory, yes? How does it work in practice you say? Exactly how they said it would. I used this card at ATMs all over China (really...all over) with no hassle at all. Charles Schwab never once charged me a fee, and when the foreign banks charged me a on-site fee to use the ATM, I was reimbursed completely. I can't tell you how convenient it is to have access to your money in any city in China. I never had to carry more than 1000 yuan (about $160) on me at any given time, and I was able to pay for everything in cash.

Are there any downsides to the Charles Schwab solution, I hear you asking? Of course, I respond; but they are few and negligible. For one, Charles Schwab does not maintain very many physical offices. In order to deposit money, you need to either transfer electronically from another account or you need to mail them a check to deposit (in postage-paid envelopes that they will provide you). The electronic transfer process is easy, but it does take a few days for the money to become available to you--best not to wait until the day before your trip to do this. The only other very minor drawback to this solution that I can think of is that you are required to open a Charles Schwab investment account to be able to hold a checking account. That sounds a bit scary until you learn that you don't have to keep a minimum balance in it. You can open the account and then leave it completely empty for no charge. It's a bit of an inconvenience, but certainly no reason to overlook all of the great qualities of the checking account.

This card worked perfectly for me. I have no reason to doubt that it won't work for you as well. It truly seems like the ideal solution for a traveler going abroad. So long as you aren't spending all of your time in completely rural areas that don't have ATMs, this could very easily be the best solution for you.

Thus concludes the first official product endorsement of this website. Charles Schwab High Yield Checking Account: I salute you.