Throwback Thursday: What I Wish I’d Known Before Moving to BJ

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Beijingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 14 year-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…

How long have you been living in Beijing? A year? A month? A decade? Your entire life? Despite all the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are still newcomers arriving in China or planning to do so as soon as borders open up, thus bringing a fresh wave of newcomers to the city: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and possibly quite unaware of how things work around here.I moved here almost two years ago, and looking back over that time it’s astonishing how much I have learned and changed. At the urging of my then-editor, I recorded my China progress with two articles, at the one-month mark, and after one full year. Now, I look back on those with wonder: I really didn’t have a clue. While I’m no China expert, many of the things that totally confounded me are now as easy as breathing. I wonder where I’ll be in another 12 months.It’s always a lot of fun to look back and see how far we have come, and in the spirit of reflection and also helping out some newcomers to this weird and wonderful city, this week we are throwing back to July 2018, when we published the article “What I Wish I’d Known Before I Moved to Beijing, Part 1: “You Aren’t Supposed to Flush Toilet Paper!”Enjoy!

“I wish I’d taken the time to learn more Chinese.”

To this, we’d also add: Mandarin is hard for English speakers, especially if you’ve not been learning it from a young age, so don beat yourself up if you’re not fluent overnight. But while there are plenty of English-language signs and a big community, there’s no doubt you’ll get a lot more out of your time here if you can chat with the locals and read a few hanzi(characters). Find a good teacher, learn words and characters, and take HSKtests so you can measure your progress.

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“If you’re shipping stuff over, make sure you fill out the customs forms!”
This can seem like an irritating minor task when you have a hundred other things to think about preparing for your move. But if you don’t, expect to have your possessions held up at Customs, to have to make a trip out to the airport to sort the problem out, and to end up paying huge sums of money on import duties (often more than the goods are worth.) Any reputable shipping company should supply you with the forms. As so often in China, just do the paperwork, no matter how pointless and tedious it seems.

“Download WeChat and connect with parenting groups in advance. They are priceless for activity info and advice/help,” and “Try to have a bank card as soon as possible (if you want to join a big group in WeChat) in order to have access to expat groups very soon.”
See our WeChat Guide about how to do this. WeChat limits access to the bigger groups unless you have a bank card linked to your account, so it’s worth setting up a local bank account even if you don’t expect to use it much.

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Photos: Unsplash 

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