What did you do in your first day of yantai? I am sure you remember it :) For the newcomers, i would recommend:

First of all, banking. Yeah, first thing i would recommend you do is open a Chinese bank account. There are 4 major Chinese banks.

Bank of China: It has the largest reserve for foreign exchange .If you would do a lot of international transactions. This would be your best choice.

China Construction Bank: It has the best online banking system of this 4 banks. ( PS. It doesn’t support Firefox t.t)

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China: It has the biggest number of branches.

Agricultural Bank of China: If you live in a small town. Most likely you will see this bank first.

And there is another bank i have to mention. It’s China Merchants Bank. Because it has the best and the most used online banking system in China. If you like online shopping, China Merchants Bank is the one.

Secondly, I would recommend you getting a cellphone number. You might have your own cellphone before you came to China but make sure it’s GSM 900/1800. There are 2 (ya, only 2) mobile phone carriers in China, China Mobile and China Unicom

There are no big difference between two carriers except some tiny price differences in my opinion. Well most of the people choose China Mobile. Here i just want to point out:

Where: take a taxi then tell the driver ” wo yao qu zhong guo yi dong” (means i want to go to China mobile) and ” wo yao qu zhong guo lian tong ( means i want to go to China Unicom) LOL yeah that’s how you get there.

What to do: choose one of those monthly plan and pay for the sim card. Remember you pay it ahead of time not after you get the bill ( China doesnt have this “pay after” system) A SMS package plan would help you most since chinese love sending SMS.

So basically these are 2 things you should do as earlier as possible when you are in China ( Yantai too).