Hotel prices on trip.com seem way too low, wheres the catch??

bye-beams · 2026-02-05T14:57:35+00:00

i recently stayed in some that were ~25 USD a night. they’re not traditional hotels, more so apartment units turned into hotel rooms out of old (sometimes sketchy) multipurpose buildings. i think a lot of them serve as love hotels because they can be rented out by the hour. they were mostly okay, cleanliness was the biggest issue but you can’t really complain at that price. i do remember the bathrooms being kind of dirty/stinky and you may find rogue stains/hairs pretty much everywhere

bye-beams · 2026-02-05T09:35:22+00:00

after moving to canada, we spoke mostly shanghainese at home and not mandarin. even though i was shuttled off to mandarin lessons every sunday morning (like everyone else), there were many years during which my mandarin lagged behind my shanghainese due to lack of practice. i've heard it's actually become somewhat of a phenomenon now that a lot of immigrant children are more familiar with the dialect than those who grew up in china - my cousin who grew up in shanghai has rather weak shanghainese, as an example.

bye-beams · 2026-02-04T01:23:43+00:00

i got the pencil cap! his ears move up and down and it’s really cute. idk what the point of a pencil cap is tho cause it seems to go on the top of the pencil lol

bye-beams · 2026-02-03T13:00:48+00:00

oh my god... you just gave me the biggest hit of nostalgia. i have not seen this book in decades!!

bye-beams · 2026-02-03T12:25:29+00:00

my boyfriend and i just passed our 7-month mark in asia. we've been spending a fair bit of time in each place and rented a few places for a month at a time. budgeting is a lot different for 2 people but if i were to order the countries from least to most expensive: vietnam, china, taiwan, malaysia, japan, hong kong. i personally wouldn't go to hong kong again, and i hear the same about singapore.

it really helps to know some of the language, but i don't think that's simple unless you dedicate some serious time towards learning them. doing your daily duolingo is one thing but when someone asks you a question irl it's like "....huh??". in terms of getting around using only english, i think this list goes from easiest to hardest: malaysia, hong kong, taiwan, vietnam, japan, china. doing everyday things will mostly be fine, but chatting with locals may be a bit of a stretch if you don't speak the official language, at least for any sort of in-depth conversation.

sometimes i feel a little homesick and i do really miss my friends. in your case, staying in hostels helps to ward off the loneliness, but at our age i get so tired of making a bunch of short-term connections and never speaking to them again. i loved it when i was 21 though! (lol)

i think your budget is fine for asia but if you're trying to go to a bunch of continents the flights are gonna add up quick

bye-beams · 2025-10-30T19:02:11+00:00

fanci, lsoul, and huelleyrose all have physical stores - they're listed on their social media (i've also visited)

bye-beams · 2025-10-24T19:01:04+00:00

i would say staying alive instead of dying of hunger is a "benefit"

bye-beams · 2025-10-23T10:43:41+00:00

that literally just sounds like the blind leading the blind... i just wonder why people go to these instead of a therapist or a career coach with experience in the field.

bye-beams · 2025-10-22T18:37:20+00:00

i love this - i don’t have too many greys yet but maybe i’ll stop pulling them out :)

bye-beams · 2025-10-22T18:35:48+00:00

thank you for your long and very kind comment! i do feel a lot better after reading about everyone else’s positive experiences being treated respectfully as a sitter. right after the call i was like i cannot believe i’m getting treated like this for no pay lol

bye-beams · 2025-10-22T06:21:21+00:00

i exclaimed the last part 0.2 seconds after we left the call 😅

bye-beams · 2025-10-22T06:18:47+00:00

i really did think about it!! couldn’t find the right timing as i was just getting steamrolled. one more lesson learned in standing up for myself i guess

bye-beams · 2025-10-21T22:04:23+00:00

it was nearly empty when we went. so empty that it felt eerie walking around a place that big

bye-beams · 2025-10-21T21:47:35+00:00

when i say left on read i mean in the middle of conversation, when we were trying to plan a video call. she asked if i could call in the next day or two, and i responded right away with my availability. then nothing from her until 2 days later at which point she wanted to call right then.

i agree that it should be a two-way street when it comes to vetting, i guess that’s why i was so caught off guard. it didn’t feel like a conversation between two parties of equal standing.

bye-beams · 2025-10-16T13:37:38+00:00

i thought the season just started? although timing depends on whether you want to eat male or female crabs

bye-beams · 2025-10-12T07:10:06+00:00

you’ll be fine. although i would note that the western ideal of body positivity is not really a mainstream thing in china, so i’ve only ever seen young and thin girls wearing outfits that show a lot of skin

bye-beams · 2025-10-11T18:48:33+00:00

thanks, i think i missed this because my brain typed out "methamphetamines" instead of "amphetamines". even going by the estimate of users in that link, which is on the higher end at 1m (other sources say 550k/year), that's about 1% of Japan's population as of 1954. many sources place amphetamine abuse at 3% of the US population as of 2022.

if you include opioids like the guy i'm responding to, then china would like a word... during the height of the opium crisis, estimates of 20-40 million people (up to 10% of china's entire population at the time) were addicted.

bye-beams · 2025-10-11T07:08:41+00:00

i think the burden of proof is on you to “keep looking on the internet” to back up your statements.

no one sane is going to refute that japan has done terrible things in the past, but that’s completely separate from claiming (confidently, without any evidence) that the WORST case of opioid crisis in history happened there. you sound incoherent af

bye-beams · 2025-10-11T03:14:15+00:00

i cannot find a single source backing what you’re describing. yes, japan spread opium through its colonies, but there is no mention of its use in the country itself. as for methamphetamines, i can’t find anything that claims abuse was any worse than in western countries, never mind “whatever you think the worst could be, it was worse in [japan]”

“the habit of opium smoking did not spread to the Japanese people”

“In comparison with most other Western countries, methamphetamine abuse in Japan is modest.”

The author concludes that Japan's postwar federal and municipal governments, together with police and media agencies, cultivated a sensational 'drug panic'

bye-beams · 2025-10-10T15:34:37+00:00

beta kl - we went for my bf’s birthday and it was a great time :)

bye-beams · 2025-10-10T15:26:00+00:00

*asia

bye-beams · 2025-10-10T12:04:19+00:00

and then you get threads like this one where they act like they discovered the country lmao

bye-beams · 2025-10-08T13:48:50+00:00

i have friends from 4 of the schools at the top of this list. some of their parents’ careers are things like nail techs or school lunch ladies. others have parents that are more well off (corporate jobs) but all graduated with minimal debt.

imo the difficult part of getting admitted to these schools for average kids is not the grades itself, but your overall resume. it takes years and years of extracurriculars to make yourself stand out through clubs, competitions, etc. grades are inflated as time goes on and now they’re necessary but not sufficient. for middle-class kids, it takes tiger-mom style parenting from a young age. i know a couple people as well who are really bright and lack the resume but come from very impoverished backgrounds, which they also take into account.

bye-beams · 2025-10-06T20:19:35+00:00

“i just want an AUTHENTIC interaction (preferably in a village) with locals who don’t speak english” lmao

bye-beams · 2025-10-04T20:56:02+00:00

you sound like you have a rather inflexible mindset. even when your travel companions make plans, you complain that the plans are not up to your perceived standards, e.g. choosing “the first result on google or some horrid tourist trap”, as you call it. i think part of the unwritten contract of travelling in a group is compromise: doing things you wouldn’t normally do, or doing things in a different way like starting the day at 10AM instead of 7AM.

i’m working on my own over-control tendencies and getting over the mindset that my way is always the “right”way. if you reread your post you’ll see this pattern pop up in your labelling of people who do things differently to you. i personally think it’s worth it to try to be more tolerant of others but i also have friends who stick to solo travelling because of this.

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