I had learned much more about the khan, and how his wall, like his legacy, shaped modern Chinese society. A kongzhu master had tried to show me how to use the yoyo; I now appreciated how difficult it was. And as for the women dancing in the square, I'd met a few ladies who'd taken up the hobby to get out of the house, make friends and get some exercise. The sights in the park were less mystifying now than when I had no clue what I was looking at - but much more interesting now that I did.

When I first arrived, China was exotic - a place as antipodean culturally as it was geographically to my American homeland.

And Beijing was a place of extremes, of superlatives, where the suffixes "ist" and "est" almost always applied. It was almost impossible to describe in hyperbole, because, when talking about the Chinese capital, the threshold for overstatement was higher than the skyscrapers climbing into its skies.

I remember walking kilometer after kilometer, ogling sights that raised my eyebrows and dropped my jaw - horse-drawn carts heaped with watermelons, various animal parts skewered by kabobs, bike lanes with their own traffic lights.

Even the shape of the phone booths surprised me.

Every chance I got I'd hop into a taxi clutching a map. I'd close my eyes and jab a finger into the plat.

"Take me here," I'd tell the cabbie, then open my eyes to see where my finger had landed.

Upon disembarking, I would marvel at the streetscapes before me. Everywhere in the city was the right place to make a wrong turn.

That day in the park, the tableaus I saw reminded me of what many foreigners who've been in China for a few years somehow forget: There isn't anything to see here - except for everything.