Weather: In winter, cooler than Guangdong. Less variety of palm trees. Leafless trees in many areas. Buildings have heating.
Food: Spicy, salty, oily. Lots of chilli padi. Jacy, you'll love it since you said you can eat chilli padi like eating rice. Hahaha.
Language: Mandarin everywhere with a strong Hunan accent. In some areas local people also speak Hunan dialect, known as "Xiang" or "Changsha hua". Almost nobody speaks English and the only Cantonese you'll hear comes from tourists.
Cities: Even their smaller cities are at least the size of Ipoh or Petaling Jaya. Lots of six-lane thoroughfares even in the smaller towns. Some district cities can rival Kuala Lumpur in size.
People: Mostly Han Chinese in the big cities of Changsha and Changde, and also in the Xiangtan and Shaoshan areas where Mao Zedong came from. In Zhangjiajie and Phoenix City areas, the minority becomes the majority. Tujia people dominate in Zhangjiajie City and Furong (Wangchun), Miao (Hmong) people live in Phoenix City.
Tourists: Usually Chinese from other parts of China, and some overseas Chinese or those from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hardly any non-Chinese foreign tourists other than Koreans. Can count the number of laowai (gwailo) faces with the fingers on one hand. Non-Mandarin speakers will have a hard time here. Being unable to speak or read Mandarin means no way to ask for help, directions, or anything.
Scenery: Breathtaking. Must visit at least once in a lifetime. Take as many photos as possible. Must visit both Tianzi and Tianmen mountains by cable car. It'll make you tremble when you realise how far you are from the ground below.
What else:
People plant veggies everywhere. At the roadside, at the riverside, on any piece of empty land where plants can grow.
It's customary to sound the horn when overtaking anyone.
Traffic rules don't exist. Yet there's some sort of unwritten order such as the customary sounding of the horn when overtaking.
A lot of people still spit everywhere in public. Kiak, ptui! Yucks. So don't ever fall down on the ground or drop anything. You'll never know if someone just spat there.
Some people throw all their rubbish outside their front or back garden. The reason: They can't afford to pay for proper waste disposal.
Cable cars and high-tension power cables go above people's houses and apartments. I don't know if it's the reluctance of those people to move out or ignorance of the potential health hazards.
In the countryside and even in some cities people still wash their clothes in the river. The water's clear, I saw it with my own eyes but I'm not confident about the cleanliness of the water.
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