Insight CityGuide Beijing

When E and I visited Asia earlier this year, our main source of information about Beijing was the Insight CityGuide Beijing. One of the reasons I chose this guidebook was its removable restaurant map guide, which turned out to be of limited use. However, the book as a whole was a great help to learning more about the main sights in China’s capital. We walked around the Forbidden City with the book open to the explanations of what we were looking at, we followed its neighborhood maps to decide where to go next, and to find a few restaurants we had had already chosen, and we took its advice for touristy activities.

The Insight CityGuide Beijing is printed in full color with plenty of information about the history and culture of the city as well as entire chapters for each of the main sights. There is also a chapter for each sector of this huge, sprawling city (including restaurant suggestions), and separate sections for accommodations. This organization is a bit different from American city guides, but I found it intuitive from a foreigner’s perspective. It worked well for us.

The only complaint I have is that the book uses no Chinese characters, only the phonetic spellings. This is fine if one needs to pronounce the name of a street to a cab driver, but if we are walking around looking for a street, the characters on the street signs bear no resemblance to the phonetic spellings in the guidebook. This is my complaint of Asian guidebooks as a whole. I have not yet seen one that has both phonetic spellings and characters, so that illiterate tourists can both read the signs and pronounce them.

As for our stay in Beijing, we managed to see all the major sights in a few short days. Unfortunately, most of these same major sights were covered with scaffolding when we arrived. Apparently, the government is doing major reconstruction and renovation work on all places of historical significance in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. After paying for our entrance ticket to the Forbidden City, for example, the three main halls in the center of the compound were invisible behind the drop cloths. It did not stop us from enjoying the rest of the huge palace, however, and we managed to spend a good five hours there.

We had the same problem at the Summer Palace, and also the Temple of Heaven. After buying our ticket and strolling through Temple of Heaven Park where the city’s most prominent temple is located, we came upon a huge pagoda covered in scaffolding, and a sign that informed us that the main temple was closed for renovation. While we could still look at the lesser temples and buildings, it was a bit of a disappointment to not go inside the main building, or even get very close.

For each place we could not see, we bought a set of postcards so that we could at least have some pictures of the real thing, not under construction.

And so it was that this afternoon, at our friends’ annual gingerbread house making party, we pulled out our postcard of the Temple of Heaven and started to build this landmark out of gingerbread. It took almost four hours and plenty of architectural and confectionary ingenuity, but I think we did a pretty good job. Thank God the hosts had included blue Twizzlers in the candy options. What would we have done without blue Twizzlers?

I have to say, I am quite proud of our edible Temple of Heaven. Not only is it a good representation of the original, it was also a lot easier to build than last year’s gingerbread project, Vienna’s St. Stephan’s Cathedral.

Insight CityGuide Beijing

Tags: travel guides Beijing, China gingerbread+houses Temple of Heaven Insight CityGuides