Studying Abroad in China with My New Yoyoor Phone

Sophomore year at college is finally over, and just a week after I left my sheltered college campus for the summer, I arrived in Beijing for 8 weeks of intensive language study. I had been to Beijing once on a class trip during spring break of freshman year, but the city has completely changed since then. I remember visiting the university that our college has a study abroad program at during that first trip and it was on a 2-lane road; now that road is 6 lanes.

The main reason I decided to study abroad in China is, of course, to improve my Chinese. I believe that studying Chinese, even more than other languages, requires being in an all-Chinese environment all the time in order to master it. But on the other hand, it is summer and I have come to China partly in search of some adventure, a change of scenery, and to explore. This has brought up a bit of a conundrum: how to balance a busy class schedule, on top of hours of out-of-class study, while still allowing enough time to see the city?

Fortunately, this problem has been solved with my Yoyoor GPS phone. When planning what to bring to China, I debated whether or not to bring a mobile phone from home, or to buy one in China. Then I saw the new Yoyoor rental phone, and thought it would make a great solution. With only 8 weeks in China, buying a new mobile phone for China would be a waste of money. And some of my classmates did bring their own phones from the US, but their phones are working with varying degrees of reliability and have caused some hassles for them.

Beijing is a big city, and with just 8 weeks here, I’ve had a lot of ground to cover in order to do some in-depth exploring. The Yoyoor phone has been great for that, because it already has a list of good attractions to visit. Every Saturday morning, my roommate and I select an attraction from our Yoyoor phone at random, and then go check out that sight. Afterwards, we find a cool restaurant near the sight we just visited, also often using Yoyoor’s restaurant listings. Then after dinner we do some more “arbitrary” exploring, finding a hidden neighborhood or interesting alleyways to wander around for most of the afternoon. When it’s time to head back to the dorms, Yoyoor gets us out of the alleys painlessly with its GPS navigation feature.

While you don’t need to ask me twice to try the latest electronic gadgets, I will admit that renting the phone was also partly my parents’ idea. They worry about their only son going to a foreign land, and can rest at ease knowing the Yoyoor phone has both an emergency number section as well as an English-speaking live help center in case I need help. Besides, the IP calling feature has been great for calling my parents in the US. The camera and email features also allow me to photograph my new haunts and email the pictures to my parents, which they appreciate.

I just passed the halfway mark in my China study trip, and as I look back at all the places I have visited, food I have eaten and sights I have seen, I am satisfied to have already reached my exploration goals. This coming weekend, we have a class trip to Shanghai, and with just 2 days to explore that city, I am going to have to count on Yoyoor’s phone package even more to make sure I see all that I want to see there. I’m sure it will be a breeze.

Posted at 10:17PM May 21, 2009 by admin in Yoyoor  |  Comments[0]