This article is about the travel and flights info. You can find some useful information in it if you are booking your China flights now.
1. The city bus service of Beijing is much cheaper than Guangzhou. You can get a 60% off on your bus fare if you buy a public transportation IC card. (you will only need to pay 0.4 rmb for the 1 rmb bus lines) This is unbelievable for the Guangzhouers. You need to pay at least 2 rmb for the bus fare in Guangzhou. If your home is a little bit far away from your company, you will pay at least 8 rmb for a day’s bus fare. I will recommend you to buy a IC card if you are planning to visit Beijing. This will save you some money on the bus fares. (for some long distance bus lines, the cost is only 2.4 rmb for 24 kilometers if you pay by IC card.)
2. The Beijing subway fees are lower than Guangzhou subway fees too. The subway of Beijing is crowded but you can save some time if you choose this kind of transportation. In Beijing, the cost is always 2 rmb for the subway, no matter how many subway stations you take. This means you only need to pay 2 rmb for 40 kilometers if you choose to take the subway to your destination. In Guangzhou, just the Line 1 subway will cost you 6 rmb (from one terminal to the other). I once paid 14 rmb for the subway fees in Guangzhou. What’s the reason for this big difference? The subway of Guangzhou is running by a company while the subway of Beijing is running by the government. The company need to make a profit of course and this is why the cost of Guangzhou subway is much higher than Beijing. Actually, the goverment of Beijing put a lot of money and effort to the subway system of Beijing. This is to encourage the people to choose this kind of public transportation instead of driving their own cars every day. As we all know, the traffic is always a headache for the Beijing goverment. A main reason for this issue is the huge number of private cars in Beijing. If they can choose the public transportation, the traffic condition of Beijing can be much better. I wanna say something about the subway fees of Guangzhou too. The average month salary for a worker is ony 1000 to 1500 rmb in Guangzhou. If they live a little bit far away from his work place, the cost for the subway will be about 200-400 rmb for a month then. This is why more and more blue collar workers choose to leave this city now. (low salary but high living cost in Guangzhou)
3. For the restaurants, I prefer the restaurants in Guangzhou. Although the price is lower in Beijing, the food of the Guangzhou restaurants is much better than Beijing. Maybe this is because the Guangzhou people like to study the recipes. 🙂
4. The vegetables in Beijng is cheaper than Guangzhou. In the suburbs of Beijing, you can get almost all vegetables at the same price of 4 rmb for 3 kilograms. In Guangzhou, the price is 4 or 5 times higher. No wonder the people in Guangzhou consume much less vegetables than Beijing.
5. In summer, Guangzhou is much hotter than Beijing. In Beijing, it is ok to live without air conditions while you will not survive with out air conditions in Guangzhou.
6. The service industry of Guangzhou is much more advanced than the service industry of Beijing. In Guangzhou, you will feel like a real customer in the restaurants, shopping malls, etc, while you will never gonna find this kind of feeling in Beijing. 🙂