I took a British family to a night market in Kunming last week. The dad stopped in front of a stall selling fried insects and just stared. "The scorpion. Is it... is it good?" he asked. I told him the truth: they taste like prawn crackers with extra crunch. The grubs are nuttier. The scorpion is mostly just a vehicle for the seasoning powder they toss on it. He bought one scorpion stick (¥15), closed his eyes, and bit. His wife filmed. His kids screamed with laughter. He opened his eyes, chewed, and said: "...it's actually not bad." That's the night market experience in a nutshell. You try things you'd never order in a restaurant. You eat while walking. You discover that some of China's best food comes on a stick from a cart with a single lightbulb. Every Chinese city has a great night market. The biggest are famous — Wangfujing in Beijing, Yuyuan in Shanghai. But the real ones are the local night markets three blocks from your hotel. Ask your front desk. They'll point you to the right street.

A client from New York asked me what I do when I get stressed. I told her: I read the Tao Te Ching. She looked at me funny — she was expecting "yoga" or "a glass of wine" maybe. But I've been reading it for over a decade now. Someone gave me a copy years ago, and it stuck. There's a line I think about a lot when work gets overwhelming: "The best way to fill a cup is to empty it first." (I'm paraphrasing — the original is more elegant.) I'm not saying you need to read ancient Chinese philosophy to enjoy China. But if you visit a Taoist temple — like Qingyang Palace in Chengdu or the temples on Qingcheng Mountain — sit quietly for a few minutes before pulling out your phone. Read the inscriptions on the pillars. Watch the incense smoke rise. You don't need to understand every character to feel what the space is trying to say. Most tourists photograph the building and leave. The ones who stay a little longer are the ones who remember it differently.

The best meal I've had this month wasn't in a restaurant. It was a ¥12 bowl of noodles from a lady who sets up her cart at the same street corner in Chongqing every evening at 6pm. She's been doing this for 18 years. Her broth simmers for five hours before she leaves home. The noodles come from a specific shop three streets over. She knows exactly when to scoop them for that perfect chewy texture. I brought an American client there once. He was nervous about street food. One bite later: "This is better than the ¥400 dinner we had last night." Here's what I've learned from 15 years of eating on Chinese streets: the best food is rarely in a guidebook. It's at the cart with the longest queue of locals. It's the lady who's been at the same spot for a decade. It's the place with one item on the menu because that's all they need to make. My advice: skip one fancy restaurant meal on your trip. Find a street cart. Point at what the person ahead of you ordered. Sit on a tiny plastic stool. It'll be the meal you remember.

A German client asked me worriedly last week: "Will I survive China without speaking Chinese?" I told him about the time I watched a Swedish tourist order dinner at a busy Chengdu restaurant entirely through charades. He pointed at a neighbour's bowl, held up two fingers, and gave a thumbs up. The waiter nodded, came back ten minutes with the exact same dish, and the guy ate it happily. You don't need Chinese to travel China. But you do need three things: 1. Google Translate with Chinese downloaded offline. Point camera at menu, get translation. Not perfect, but good enough. 2. Pleco dictionary for when Translate fails. The handwriting input is a lifesaver for single characters. 3. A willingness to be wrong. You'll point at the wrong menu item, order something unexpected, and discover your new memorable dish. That's not a mistake — that's the experience. The three phrases I make every client learn: 谢谢 (thank you), 多少钱 (how much), and 这个 (this one — accompanied by pointing). With those three, you can handle 90% of daily interactions. My client survived. Thrived, actually. Ate his way through three cities without a single English menu.