I am just going to dive in and start answering the questions you all sent me for Nablopomo.  I will try to post for 30 days straight, but possibly that means I can be done before Thanksgiving.

Here we go (in no particular order):

Anne asks:

We are planning a return trip to China this spring but do not want to go as part of a tour because the kids would probably hate China if we got on a bus at the crack of dawn, went sight-seeing and shopping for the whole day, and returned at nightfall. Is it reasonable to think we can go without guides? Our Chinese is limited. If we wanted to use a guide for a couple of days in a certain city, any ideas on how to connect with one?

I think the question is really dependent on what kind of travelers you are.  Have you traveled extensively outside the the US?  Do you speak any Chinese at all?  Where do you hope to go?   If you are traveling only in Beijing and Shanghai or to very tourist-heavy locations (Guilin or Xian for example), you will probably be fine.  If you are going to any 2nd or 3rd tier city without any experience traveling in developing countries with no knowledge of Chinese, it could very well be a complete nightmare.

Traveling in China with kids is not for the faint of heart.  My kids are great travelers, Mr. A speaks passable Chinese (and I understand quite a bit) and we have both traveled in China before (including Mr. A living there for a year).  But let me assure you, there were days where I thought we were going to kill each other or throw in the towel due to the stress of trying to do the following:

• Manage the hotel- check in, figure out how to use the internet, explain that the internet is not working, figure out if the bill was correct, make sure our credit cards were not overcharged, make sure the cleaning people did not steal our stuff, figure out how to do laundry, make the TV work, get fresh towels, discover your carefully chosen hotel sucks and find a new one.

• Get to where we wanted to go in a timely manner- find a taxi if there isn’t one outside the hotel, communicate to the taxi driver where you want to go, find a taxi when you come out of the destination, explain how to get to your hotel, try not to die of asphyxiation from the taxi driver’s cigarettes,  argue with/negotiate with the taxi driver over the price, find the subway station, figure out how to get over the one way streets and overpasses to get to your destination when you come out the subway exit, talk to the subway attendant about buying tickets, figuring out where the closest subway is, figure out why the subway you want is not coming, shove your way into the subway without losing the children, figure out how to buy tickets to shows you want to see, figure out wtf that thing is in the Forbidden City, figure out that you actually exited at the wrong end of the forbidden city and can not find a taxi/subway/place to eat, fend off thousands of hawkers while you try to read your map, realize the map from one year ago is hopelessly outdated due to the pace of construction in China, get scammed by guys who tell you the wrong information so they can force you to pay extra for their bus, manage the nightmare chaos at the small airport for your intercountry flight, try to buy train tickets during Chinese Spring Festival (aka the greatest annual human migration in the world).

• Figure out what stuff is worth seeing-  spend days and days looking at guidebooks and online to figure out what things you should see, try those things to discover the kids are bored silly (Forbidden City, Tiananmen square, etc), revise plans to try to find more kid-friendly activities, realize that “kid friendly” could mean that you are looking at pickled fetuses and corpses

• Food- (Despite all the problems above, food was by far our biggest challenge in the PRC) Keep enough food in your room so you can eat breakfast without needing to find a restaurant when you are jetlagged, figure out what things at 7-11 you are willing to eat, make sure your hotel is ALWAYS near a 7-11, make sure you stop sightseeing at least an hour before you want to eat so you have enough time to locate a restaurant, figure out how to order when you can’t read the menu, carry enough snacks for the kids in case there is no restaurant anywhere near where you are sightseeing,  learn that the only food that is easily accessible to you is unappealing,  get food poisoning at least once due to eating at a sketchy restaurant and/or street vendor, get screamed at in Chinese for not understanding the order/get a ticket/turn it in when your food comes system and you lost the ticket, spend hours walking around the trying to locate the restaurant you saw yesterday that looked good, try to order only to have the vendor turn their back on you because they don’t want to deal with trying to figure out what you want, get stuck at a sightseeing place where there are inexplicably no options to buy food, listen to the kids whine about how much they hate all the food, watch a kid who previously ate anything and everything refuse to eat anything but white rice, watch the other kid insist only on eating candy for five days.