Beijing Warning or Danger Tips by easyoar

Tiananmen Square is the heart of China. If you are going to do something silly in China, do NOT do it in Tiananmen Square. Rules are rigorously enforced there. These rules include taxis not being allowed to stop there (they have to drive you round the corner and stop - the driver isn't being awkward!), and bicycles are not allowed to be ridden across it.

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The first thing I did in Beijing was throw my bags into my hotel room and head off to the Forbidden City. Within minutes of the taxi dropping me off, I had a Chinese girl come up to me and ask if she could practice her English. "Sure" I said, but I'm going in there (Pointing at the Forbidden City). It soon turned out that she was an "Art Student" and wanted me to look at her paintings (which as they weren't in the Forbidden City I never got to see ;-) ). I was accosted numerous times by "Art Students" - one even got me INSIDE the forbidden city (her boss had a display inside).

The conversations soon went like this: "Hi, can I practice my English with you" "OK" "What do you do..." "Let me guess what you are, are you an Art Student?". This normally worked out as a very polite way of getting rid of them!

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It was not uncommon (especially at night if I was wandering around alone), for guys to approach me with lines like "Nice girl, pretty girl, massage yes?"

I'm not sure on the legalities of this in China, but can imagine that there may well be lots of opportunities to get fleeced if you were to go along with any of these propositions.

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This is easier said than done especially with the language barrier, but if you get angry or aggressive people will immediately behave much worse towards you, and observers will believe you are the party at fault.

I normally found that if things were awkward, but you stayed very very calm, and just made a pain of yourself by not going away and continually explaining what your problem was (I could only say Thank-you in Chinese and I did most of my Chinese trip alone), you could normally rectify the problem. Albeit rather slowly sometimes!

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