Two of my friends came to visit me for 10 days recently. I have been planning for their arrival for months! It seemed like the day would never come, but now it has come and gone.  

We crammed as much as we could into the 10 days, and I must admit, they were troopers. We went to Shanghai and visited Disney, the Shanghai Tower and the Bund. We went out, had one too many drinks and visited a cool local tourist destination that had the world's longest escalator and the girls even got to take the slide down the Great Wall, which they had been sending me videos of for months.

They accepted the culture, had fun and didn't complain when the going got tough.

Before they arrived, I was a little stressed trying to relay all the information needed to make a trip to China, including visas, registering with the police and traveling within the country. But now, that is a long distant memory and the post-visitor blues have started to set in.

However, another friend of mine just had a visitor who was an absolute nightmare. She arrived and hadn't followed any of her friend's instructions. She didn't listen to what her friend told her to do after leaving the airport and when my friend got off work, her phone was flooded with mean and hateful messages from her visitor saying she was going to just get a hotel room.

When they went to Thailand together, her visitor lost her passport in Malaysia on their layover. When the passport situation was finally handled and she arrived in Thailand, their vacation in paradise turned into the vacation from hell. I truly felt bad for her but secretly happy for me, my guests were angels.

In addition, the second day her friend was here, we all went out to dinner. She was rude to the waiters and continued to try to tell everyone what to do, even though we live here and she had only been in China for two days. And to make matters worse, she lost her cellphone in a cab.

We all know what it's like being in a new place and that being open and flexible will get you a lot farther than being stubborn and a know-it-all. Being an expat is hard, and it is always a nice idea to think that someone is going to visit you and see how you live your life. But, you need to be sure that your visitor won't turn your life upside down.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.