I visited China last year with G Adventures (The trip was amazing! You should check it out.).
I’m not much of a coffee addict unless I’m visiting Melbourne, where it is culturally unacceptable to be anything else! I do enjoy the odd Mocha though, so when a couple of my new friends wanted to grab a coffee one afternoon in Beijing I tagged along.
Coffee culture is relatively new in China, but the cities are seeing an increase in the appearance of Starbucks and other big chains (*groan*) as the trend spreads from the west. This is hardly surprising – the coffee chains fit right in with the KFC, McDonalds and Pizza Hut ‘restaurants’ which have been around for much longer.
What did surprise me, though, was the cost of a coffee. A Starbucks mocha costs around 35 RMB (Chinese Yuan) in Beijing – that’s about £4. Quite a bit more expensive than it costs here in the UK!
What’s really surprising is that you could spend that same 35 RMB on a full meal, including a drink, in a reasonably nice restaurant in Beijing.
The moral of this story? Kick your coffee habit before you visit China. Otherwise, expect to double your food and drink budget… or experience a nasty withdrawal headache!
(Actually, you’ll probably get the headache anyway – coffee is pretty much unavailable outside of the cities!)