hi everybody it's Anming. I returned to my hometown which is Detroit
not really Detroit but the suburbs of Detroit and it feels really weird to be
back because I've been gone for about 14 months well yeah that's a long story so
I've been living abroad for a while and mostly living in China and also Japan
and every time I come home I like to reflect on my time that has been spent
in other places so for this episode of what's it like I want to tell you about
the worst vacation I ever had in my life and this was really bad it happened in
China unfortunately which is a place that I really like and I've been on a
lot of trips there but just happened to be a really bad trip so I know there's a
lot of hype out there about places you can see in the world and you'll see
stuff on Facebook that will show you like play-doh colored mountains and
really cool stuff and then if you're like me and you actually go there if you
go to the middle of the Gobi Desert and look for this place you find out it
actually looks like this so that was pretty disappointing but that's not the
trip I want to talk to you about I want to talk to you about a trip that's even
worse and it was pretty bad because it was just too crowded
so every time a national holiday comes around in China
people will ask me
So you're seeing a pattern I just don't want to go anywhere during the national holiday
because there are a ton of people same in Japan
why don't I have any interest in traveling at that
time well I think you'll see from this video it's pretty crazy cuz where I come
from in Detroit we don't all take our vacations at the same time we tend to
spread them out because I mean that's just what we do but in Japan and China
and South Korea they really take a vacation as a whole country and it's
pretty crazy as you're gonna see in these videos so what made this trip
especially bad well I guess my expectations were a little high
because I was told this is where avatar was filmed and it's like the coolest
place ever so you should go and a lot of people were going and was all hyped up
so I took my Japanese friend there and Wow it was a really bad trip like from
start to finish it was just all around a really bad trip
after that my friend said I don't want to come back to China so you know that's
unfortunate because there's a lot of good things to see in China so what
happened well there's a heck of a lot of scams out there and they're not just
scams for foreign people because we happen to be on a Chinese tour in the
Chinese language from a Chinese tour company well Chinese people get ripped
off all the time basically it was way too crowded it was July so that was my
bad for going during this summer holiday but it was way too crowded people were
pushing people were shoving people were very loud which is something I'm kind of
used to living in a very crowded country like China
But what really made that trip bad was the fact that we paid for a tour and then the tour company just
didn't give us the stuff that they were supposed to well they did but really
they they picked the cheapest food the cheapest hotel the cheapest things you
could possibly find and then wasted half of our time on this trip just taking us
to souvenir shops and I'm not talking about your regular souvenir shops I'm
talking about a silver shop where the cheapest thing is like five hundred US
dollars or over three thousand Chinese yuan or they took us to a mattress shop
I couldn't believe it I'm like we walk into there and it's a
thai-style mattress shop cuz that that makes a lot of sense when you're in
China go to go to a mattress shop in the countryside that has a Thai theme
it was like you walk in there and they have you in classrooms and they're
telling you about all the product features and trying to get you excited
like hey that's what I want to do when I'm in China I wan to
by a mattress like that's the first thing that I want yeah how did you know
yeah I don't want to buy mattress oh my gosh it was just fail after fail and
sometimes the tour guide will get mad at you if you don't buy anything and to top
it all off like my Japanese friend doesn't speak Chinese and he would it
was just too polite to say anything to them so you know while they're speaking
Chinese just sitting there like
Like I don't understand anything that's going on but yeah I ended up getting really upset
at the end of that trip just because I feel like I I did my friend a disservice
and there's nothing I could really do about it at that point once we got there
but man some of this stuff they it's a very beautiful place they just kind of
ruined it and I say they I mean the the people who manage the park they put
elevators and escalators inside the mountain and like everything was
controlled you couldn't do anything everything had really railing on it
it just didn't feel very authentic although the place was very beautiful
so that was a worst trip I ever had in China and it ended up costing a lot of
money and it ended up costing even more because as soon as we got to the gate
the tour guide of our whole group asked everyone to pay 700 yuan just to let us
in even though we had already paid for the fee for the tour and everything he
just wanted an extra 700 yuan which is about 130 US dollars and I thought
everyone on this bus is gonna like tear him apart and you know what they didn't
they paid for it and I couldn't believe it so we got totally ripped off like the
amount of money I had to pay to go through that was insane just to feel
like you're you're a cow walking around on a farm because you're being herded
everywhere it was pretty disappointing so if you get the chance to go to
Zhangjiajie make sure it's the right season don't go in the in the heat of the
summer and don't go in the middle of the travel season cuz you're just gonna be
disappointed in that and don't do a tour just go by yourself it's really not that
hard to figure it out there so that's my advice and that was the worst tour ever
took so you know a message to the Chinese agencies out there like don't
oversell your place sell it for what it is because when people are when people
go there they're gonna be disappointed if it doesn't live up to the
expectations you put out there but you know they're working on it and I don't
think they quite realized that if people have a bad experience they're gonna tell
other people and then the place is gonna have a bad reputation so
Right, they need to improve it a little
That's my story for today thanks everyone for listening and I'll try to make some more
videos all right and see you next time bye bye