Tianjin G'apartment - Five Great Avenues

Good but location hard to find for a foreigner. Fortunately, the host provide me information on how to get to the apartment. Nice place, nice district, near a mall, convenient stores and Mac Donald, Starbucks, Tim Hortons, etc, etc...

Apartment hard to find without host information (for a foreigner), maybe some clarification and more explicative pictures is necessary to find easily how to get there...

I had one of the larger apartments, which was absolutely ok. It had its quirks and problems (see below), but it definitely belongs to the better category in Tianjin. When something went broke, often it was fixed within reasonable time. So if you can live with the drawbacks described below, it is a good choice. Also it was not really loud. I was a bit unlucky to have a sleepless, aggressive child living above, which loved to shout and throw things late at night. But, apart from that, because on the floor it was mostly offices, while busy during the day it typically was calm at night. The condition of the building, according to Chinese standards, also is ok and above average. Nothing really to complain about and the neighbors and people coming and going (it is a business building) are ok. Definitely suitable for families. The neighborhood in general is very good. Many restaurants, sightseeing sites, cafès, bars, banks in walking distance. But do not expect too much from the fact that there is a mall in the building. It has McDonald´s, KFC, Starbucks, hairdressers, convenience stores etc., but for example no real supermarket. There are however some Chinese supermarkets in the neighborhood and some malls with international goods in walking distance (750-1500m). I did not not use the underground, but it is easy to reach from within the building.

My (large) apartment had few closets. Also, not high and not deep at all. So I ended up having most of my clothes either remaining in the suitcase or hanging on rackets. Which not only does not look good, but also does not provide any protection against dust etc. And I was a man alone. Had my wife been with me, it would have been a desaster, I am sure. I do not know why booking.com still says that you can use international credit cards. You can not! So you either have enough limit for cash-withdrawals or some Chinese account (WeChat, Alipay etc.). There also is a possibility to go through a third party provider. But that costs about 12% on top, which the hotel expects you to bear. I do not understand why people here say that the WiFi is good? It is horrible. Sometimes extremely slow but, even worse, very often the connection gets lost. Which is terrible if you are working in a VPN, have a video conference or watch Netflix. I spent many hours waiting for reconnection or rebooting the modem and the router. First, I thought it was the equipment in the apartment. But then I learned that others in the building had exactly the same problem. Very important: located in a business building, the apartment has central aircondition. Which means you cannot pass the typical home quarantine in the apartment. Which can happen every day. Coming back from Beijing, I was forced into a very poor official quarantine hotel for 5 days. No discussion. And, yes, I had to pay for both. Almost every day at about noon and in the evening the apartment had very strong cooking odor. First I thought it came through the air-condition and turned that off (no fun at 36 degrees). But that did not help. I do not know whether the other apartments have the same problem. When I tried to extend my stay locally, price discussions were weird, with daily rates partly more than doubling. So, if you plan to extend, think about how, early. For me, this was the reason to move out.