My Life in the Coming Five Months
It feels strange to finally be free. It’s both exciting and frightening. 
I finished High School and will be taking some time off before continuing to University and am planning to stay in China for a year (hopefully). Last week, I went to apply for a Visa. Yesterday, I finally got it. I have permission to stay in China for 180 days starting July 1st.
Yesterday, I also bought plane tickets, they cost 6300 SEK (approx. $900 USD). I will fly Economy with SAS and arrive on Monday July 9th in Beijing and come back to Stockholm on November 10th.
This past week I have been planning and researching about what I am going to do. This is how it currently looks (subject to change of course).
- Stay in Beijing 1-2 months, depending on how I like it there and price & location of apartment. I am having a hard time finding an apartment at a good district for a reasonable price for short-term renting. The minimum requirement seems to be 6 months everywhere.
- Move down to Guangdong and check out the cities Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, see which one I like best, and settle down.
- Attend the China Sourcing Fair on October 13-16 in Hong-Kong. Meizu will be there. But I have a visa problem. 180 day visa holders are only allowed to enter China once, if I visit Hong-Kong I may not be allowed back. This is an issue that I’ll look into once I’m in China.
I get home in November to visit family and renew my visa to China again.
After the recent site sale, I now have enough money to live comfortably for 6-10 months in China. This includes eating in restaurants everyday, good pocket money and partying on weekends.
During the last few days, I have also been registering domains and working on a few websites. There will be 6 new sites spanning 3 different niches being released by me in the coming months. And 2 E-Books. Gotta keep busy, eh?
June 20th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I took 1 year off of school before I started college and it worked out perfect. You will learn alot with your time off. Good luck with everything sounds like you have quite the adventure ahead of you!
June 20th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Carl, congratulations on the sale of the site, I hope you have a great time in China! You can always set up business by importing goods from there and selling them in your hometown!
June 20th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
shaun - I agree and really think that I’ll gain some much needed real life experience from my trip!
Khalid - Yeah thanks! In fact, I’ve been thinking about China import/export recently. There are a lot of foreigners living in China selling things on the internet.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
[…] 20th, 2007 by Carl Yesterday I wrote about working on six new sites. I was wrong, there’s actually seven. The first one I’ll make public is Web Venturers, […]
June 21st, 2007 at 12:38 am
Any sneak peeks at the domains?
You will certainly have some great fun. What is your strategy for maintaining your blog? Will you be updating based on your daily adventures?
June 21st, 2007 at 5:06 am
Heya Carl,
I am so happy for you, as you are about to set off on this journey.
I hope you plan to KEEP us all UPDATED on everything.
What you can do is pull a Justin.TV while over there.
June 21st, 2007 at 9:29 am
Hey guys! I will keep you updated on the journey. I have actually planned to do so in a separate blog where I only write about China, and keep this blog the same, writing about general life, web and tech topics.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:47 am
[…] back from China. Stockholm is cold compared to Zhuhai, where you currently can wear a t-shirt and get by. So what […]