Time Out Beijing (Time Out Guides)

By Time Out

A bustling juxtaposition of age-old and ultra-mod, Beijing is being remade for the 2008 Olympics; buildings have come down to be replaced by glitzy, high-rise blocks -- but that's not the only excitement this city has to offer. From its amazing all-night bars and the best spots for Peking Duck to day trips to the Great Wall and beyond, Time Out Bejing provides insider information on everything Beijing. With critical coverage by a local team of writers and color photos and maps throughout, this new guide is the ideal companion for travelers to this one of the four great, ancient capitals of China.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1904978746
• ISBN13: 9781904978749
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Time Out
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Better than the Lonely Planet Guide

This Time Out Guide provides decent information in terms of the nuts-and-bolts of getting around Beijing. On that score, Time Out equals the Lonely Planet Beijing book. In terms of recommending restaurants, shops, bars and markets, however, the Time Out book wins hands down. Time Out led us to several excellent restaurants we never would have found on our own (plus one that was not so hot). We brought both books, but after a couple days left the Lonely Planet book in our room, never to pick it up again.

Prettiest travel book!

The Time Out guides are consistently gorgeous. Though short, they are full-color and have great interviews of influential people in Beijing-- restaurant owners, locals, and travel experts, so you can get a better feel of the city before you go. Once you go, however, it's hard to find your way around using this guide alone - none of the Chinese venue names or addresses are provided, and even if you speak Mandarin (like me) they only provide you with anglicized and incomplete pinyin forms of the original Chinese characters, so you can't even try to pronounce the names to your cabbie without butchering the names! It would be impossible getting around with this guide alone, but it has great content for the hip 20-30 crowd, and I had my trusty iPhone loaded with the HoodHot Beijing Taxi Guide, which translated all the English names to Chinese and had addresses too (score!), so I just read about the places I wanted to go in the Time Out guide, left it at the hotel, and only had to bring my iPhone to get to the places I wanted to go (NOT looking like a tourist, thank you very much!). Pick up a local city weekend guide or the time out magazine to get local event info too.