Hi, I’m Thijs Terlouw. I lived in Shenzhen, in southern China,
for about five years. During that time my wife and I got married there, had our
first child there, studied Chinese, travelled around Guangdong and further into
China, and generally worked out how daily life in a Chinese megacity actually
works – the metro, the hospitals, the shopping malls, the paperwork, the food.
I started writing things down because so much of what we learned was hard to
find in English at the time: how the hukou system affects a mixed-nationality
baby, how to register a pregnancy, which malls have a Western supermarket, how to
get to a temple park on the edge of the city. This site collects those notes.
I now live and work in the Netherlands. A lot of the older articles describe
Shenzhen as it was between roughly 2008 and 2013, so prices, opening hours and
rules will have moved on – where an article is clearly dated, there is a note
at the top saying so. Newer articles (the airport, the metro, robotaxis, recent
trips) reflect more recent visits.
Everything here is written from personal experience. Photos are my own unless
noted otherwise.
Contact
Questions, corrections or additions are welcome – see the
contact page, or leave a comment on the relevant article.