About Us
An "Expat" (short for Expatriate) is a person living and working in a country different from his own, without having the guest countries citizenship.
It is not that we are keen on the "expat-status" or that we reject the sourrounding culture, but rather that no matter how hard we try to adapt, we will always be the "lao-wai". You can see it from the shape our nose or, for our Asian expat friends, from their accent when speaking Chinese.
When debating about making this site, we thought of dropping the "expat" in the name and replace it by something more "community" like (to not seperate us from our Chinese friends willing to participate) but later decided to keep it for one simple reason: Make it easy to be found.
What is this page good for?
Nearly all expats face the same challenges when going to a new destination: Where to live, where to register, where to buy foreign/imported food or where to meet other expats, just to name a few.
While Guilin is a major tourism destination in China, it has only a small expat population. If you come here on your own you might live your life for weeks without meeting another expat. The main purpose of this site is to connect Guilin Expats together, inform about expat related events, and collect all the accumulated expat experience into one place.
Many Chinese try to get contact to foreigners regarding business, friendship, learning a new language or just out of curiosity. We hope that with this site and our events we can build bridges between the local population and the foreigners living here; to step by step remove prejudices and build frindships.
We need you...
...to help us. We are only few and our resources are limited. Next to work, family there is never much time to build this site. So if you have an interesting story to share on the blog, you want to help translate some Chinese text into English or you plan to host an event, please contact us.
If you want to join our small team, please feel free to click here and get into contact with us.