With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. =)
My personal experience as a Western tourist is that I could travel all around China for 2 months with no real issues. The provided itinerary was mostly a formality (and I didn't have to stick to it strictly). I managed to book hotels, trains, I even got a permit to go to Tibet (although a guide was required for that portion of the trip). It's true not all hotels can host foreigners, but in practice that's rarely a problem.
Although I personally wouldn't live there long term, China has actually a lot to offer as a tourist destination. It's very safe and there's lots of interesting history and beautiful nature to explore. It can obviously be challenging to move around without speaking the language, but some spirit of adventure goes a long way.
We're not talking about whether China is worth visiting. I think so, my tourist visa experience was in fact applying to walk a part of the Chinese Silk Road in 2019 with my (Cantonese-speaking but non-Chinese national) wife and we were politely told to shelve that particular idea permanently. There was no visa-free entry at all back then. We ended up going to Macao instead, and had a good time, though not at all what we originally planned.
In any case, the question was whether learning a Chinese language allows you to go on unique tourist experiences that would otherwise be unavailable. And the answer is that it doesn't, certainly not to the extent that it's worth learning a language, because, as you yourself state, you don't need to know the language to visit the approved destinations, and while there are some experiences that would require you to know the language, they are anyway outside the approved set of destinations and you'll be blocked using all bureaucratic systems from visiting them anyway.
I was also there in 2019 by the way. Out of curiosity, which part of the Silk Road did you want to walk? I can see why you would get denied permission to hang out near the Taklamakan desert.
Yes I do, of course, and I actually use it nearly exclusively for multi-file projects: I don't write short scripts everyday, but I have bigger projects that need more features. The one I am on: extract data from an existing DB, format it, save it to a csv, send it with SFTP. I build a binary and send it to my servers.
For this I use :ciel as a dependency, I use a typical project structure: a system definition in an .asd file (that :depends-on (:ciel)), and sources. I also start my editor with CIEL's core image. I build a binary the usual way out of this, I don't run this app as a script, specially if I added a couple dependencies. But that's OK, I benefited from CIEL during development.
I recommend to start with a file packages.lisp that defines 1 (one) package for the whole application, to use it across multiple files, until it makes sense to create a second package. Otherwise, one can easily loose oneself into export & import symbols hell, specially when we are new at it. So I don't recommend the "one-package-per-file" approach.
Hopefully the Cookbook gets you covered if you need examples.
