Guidebooks and Ice Cream

The photos above and directly below are of the Insight City Guide: Beijing. Excellent photos, information, and suggestions, as well as enough background to make you sound like you know what you're talking about when you get there. My copy had a bonus (below): a small fold-up map of recommended restaurants in a plastic pocket. Even if you just carry the tiny map, you'll have a list of emergency numbers, including ones to call if you lose your credit card. The Insight Guide's one drawback: no Chinese characters. Carry a map with Chinese characters for place names to supplement a book like this to show a cab driver. It doesn't have accents for the pinyin, either, but neither do other guidebooks. The map insert and the outside cover of the book match. I believe the publishing company is European, but I'm not sure if it's British. That's the Temple of Heaven on the cover of the insert map and a view of the Forbidden City above.


This is Coffee Ice Cream at the Stairway to Love Internet Cafe. I thought it was going to be a scoop of coffee-flavored ice cream in a dish, but it turned out to be a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top of strong ice coffee, with some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. No, folks, don't adjust your sets: it's a green maraschino cherry. Is it still maraschino if it's green? I had the pizza there today too, and it was very good. Green peppers, red peppers and sausage. Great crust. I took a pass on the cuttlefish pizza. You can see the Insight Guide in the background as well as my map.

One of the points of this blog is to provide some information for students who might come on this trip to China and Japan in the next year or two. So - if you are planning a trip, something you will want to bring with you is a guidebook. I asked students to bring two: one for China, and one for Beijing. I also suggested a phrasebook, after seeing how helpful those were on trips to Central America, Spain, and North Africa. Guidebooks themselves are a genre: some are designed for students or backpackers, others for businesspeople, yet others for tourists. All of the categories overlap. Some are big and fat, and some slim and pocket-sized. (In his book Abroad Fussell laments the demise of an English series called The Travelers' Library: "...by 1932 [the series] included 180 titles with over a million copies in print. The volumes, smaller than 5 X 7 inches, bound in a fine, light-blue gold=stamped cloth and selling for 3/6 [3 shillings sixpence] (about a dollar), were 'designed for the pocket.'")

Although those can be found now only in libraries and antiquarian bookstores, current guidebooks that can be easily carried are a godsend. I love my Insight City Guide: Beijing. The Insight guides come in different sizes, including Pocket Guides and Compact Guides. If you're planning a vacation (and I think many of the students are already planning ways they can return to China, perhaps with their families) this is an excellent guide to Beijing. It's even the kind of book that the traveler would enjoy after a trip, recalling some of the places we have visited and reinforcing the memories we're creating. Fussell writes a lot about the process of reading about travel while you're traveling: some of us find this the best time to read. After all, when traveling you're cut off from many of your usual reading outlets: most of us have read all the books or magazines we've brought for pleasure, and you have to work a little to find English-language books (plenty of classics available at the publishing house bookstore, but you have to be really virtuous to want to read Dickens or Hawthorne while in China) and most American magazines are not available. I read some of the N.Y. Times and other news online, but it's not the same as enjoying a paper paper. Like me, some of the students mentioned they would rather do their reading once they are in a location (and of course we have the time to do it) rather than preparing for a trip by reading; others like to read obsessively before they arrive.

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Stairway to Love Internet Cafe plotting out possible itineraries for my husband and son, who will be visiting soon, and thinking of ideas for the students to use during their week off. Some of them have the Lonely Planet guide to Beijing, which is part of a series students around the world use a lot. One possibility is Liulichang, the old "Artistic Street," where you can buy art supplies, especially those used for calligraphy. I know a really interesting restaurant there (it's the one with the live fish that turns into the Mandarin fish that looks like a Blooming Onion). Our organized trip to the Forbidden City isn't until the last week, but it's not hard to get to either there or Tian'anmen Square, exactly in the center of Beijing. Both of those will be packed this week, which seems to be like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July rolled into one week. Wangfujing, which we have already visited, is within walking distance of Tian'anmen Square, and its pedestrian mall is an attraction during a time when traffic may not move very fast. We've noticed that the traffic around the school has thinned out a lot (especially people on bicycles, since many people don't have to work) but is busier than ever around the interior of the city, where most of the attractions are.