Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Happy belated National Day to everyone in China! In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread.
Get a VPN (I can personally recommend LetsVPN or Astril, both are good) or if you get a HK sim, an esim like holafly, or a roaming plan for your current sim you should be able to use your data without being subject to the great firewall
If you have an iPhone then apple maps is pretty decent, Baidu maps is better but in chinese only afaik
Get a payment app. I used Alipay as it accepts overseas cards but I think WeChat accepts them now too.
Download WeChat anyways because its so useful and you never know when you might want to add someone
Make use of the conversation feature on google translate and make sure to download the language packs in case you don’t have internet for whatever reason