Got Alipay to work in China as proxy for Didi Meituan and Baidu
🇨🇳 Okay got Alipay to work
Alipay is nice because it acts as a proxy to use other apps like Didi, and Didi won't let me sign up directly, so via Alipay it auto logs you in (kinda like OAuth)
Also Meituan app lets me order food from anywhere and apparently it can arrive via a delivery robot
Other handy app is Baidu Translate
The challenge here is that every Western app like Google Translate, ChatGPT, Google Maps, ChatGPT etc doesn't work at all or doesn't work most of the times, so you kinda have to use the Chinese apps, like DeepSeek
Of all my eSIMs my Revolut Global seems to work best, it lets me SOMEHOW open most Western sites fast with no firewall, while Airalo is extremely spotty switches to E (Edge) all the time, I also tried Airalo Hong Kong thinking I could use the Great Firewall hack but that didn't work
Whatever @revolut Global eSIM is doing it works amazing in China
Yesterday in the subway none of our eSIMs worked though, like we had reception but both of our phones didn't get internet to work. Also nobody spoke any English (which I understand, we're in China) and nobody can read English either
So essentially we were illiterate (can't read anything), with no internet, nobody to help us. We tried getting a taxi but they wouldn't take us either because we couldn't communicate
Again 99.9% of Chinese don't speak a single word of English, even in 2025, which is OK, it just makes things harder
Calling the hotel with my Dutch phone SIM for €5/min ended up being the solution because they could talk to the taxi drivers
So yes everything kinda works now!
What I see with these travel blogs btw if I write it's difficult I get a lot of replies like "lol fucking n00b!"
Which is easy to say but again it's not so easy here
But that's also the fun part of China, especially after COVID tourism here from the West appears to have dropped rapidly and Western-Chinese relations have deteriorated rapidly after realizing what a threat China can be in its fast technological development etc.
That makes it more interesting as a traveler though because you're the only foreigner almost everywhere
I will keep you blogging what I experience next
P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
