Our return to China filled me with a remarkably strong and surprising joy. Certainly some of this emotion can be explained by the lifting of the economic tension of being in Japan, and some of it by the warm sun that shined dry and hot on us as we walked out of the airport train. Some of it must have been due to the waves of heady food smells that seemed to break over every intersection and ride on every breeze in Beijing. I love Japanese food, but for pure knock-you-to-the-ground aromas, it's got to be Chinese: the scent of pork so rich you can almost feel the fat clinging inside your nostrils, the redolent waft of five-spice mixes, the singe of peppers, and the rich doughy steam of dumplings are aggressive scents that don't just sit idly by waiting to be smelled.

But there was something else about returning to China, something I still haven't figured out, that just felt familiar and simple and good. Maybe we had been traveling so long that returning to a place we had spent even a couple weeks in felt familiar and homey.

So I'm not sure if it was the aura of my good mood that made all of the street vendors and restaurateurs seem so friendly, helpful and indulgent, or if it was their goodness that sustained my mood, but either way, from the first moment in Beijing, I felt that people were interested in our eating well and enjoying their city.

Our first meal in Beijing, in a noodle shop chosen at random, a woman helped us order by presenting a verbal decision tree in addition to the picture menu: "beef, pork? stir-fried? rice? noodles? spicy?" I chose a rich five-spice beef noodle soup with a variety of cuts of meat, tender wheat noodles, and just enough fresh bok choy to keep the dish from being too cloying. Greg had a searing pork stir-fry on a brazier, the slightly stringy and firm meat becoming softer and spicier as it sat over the heat. Somehow it seemed so different from anything we'd eaten for weeks, like it had more body, more bite.

Likewise, a meal we had later in the week, in a tiny Muslim restaurant deep in the network of hutongs south of Tiananmen Square, was so simple and yet so satisfying that it could only be explained by a mystical alignment of glutamic acid, fats and spices. I had a stir-fry of lamb and fried bread with onions, peppers and tomato sauce, while Greg had a similar sauce with noodles and eggs. I think there was something about the crisp and salty fried edges of the otherwise chewy bread, catching savory tomato sauce in all their crannies, that was responsible for the alchemy.

That same restaurant also offered one of Beijing's popular street foods, seasoned and grilled skewers of meat, most often lamb. Beijing's other street vendor specialties included deep-fried fermented tofu and tanghulu, or candied fruit. The tofu is a great snack for after a couple beers, thanks to its stinky cheese quality, crisp fried corners, and spicy sauce.

Tanghulu is made by dipping skewers of fresh fruit, anything from strawberries, kiwis, and mandarins to the ubiquitous round and nicely mushy hawthorn, into a sugar syrup that mostly hardens, enclosing the tender fruit in a shell of super-teeth adherent. The resulting crunchy, chewy, juicy combo is irresistible, even when the fruit inside are a little past their prime — as they often are.

A few street food items we enjoyed but didn't get photos of were a sweetened fresh yogurt drink that came in adorable paper-topped ceramic bottles; a variety of thin, fried, stuffed egg pancakes; and a fruit and nut loaf sold in slices hacked off of blocks so big they have to be carted around on giant wheeled platforms. I'm kicking myself especially for not getting photos of the yogurt, which, in addition to being sold in the cutest containers ever, was perfectly tart and not overly sweetened. Luckily I'm not the only person who's been to Beijing with a camera.