While Beijing seems to operate on a larger scale than the rest of the world, ultimately its giant spaces tie together small moments in the lives of hundreds of people. Take, for example, Beijing's lake district. Lined with bars, night clubs, restaurants, street food carts, and neon, the Qianhai, Houhai and Xihai Lakes are a center of Beijing nightlife. Their shores are the perfect place to peoplewatch and soak up the reflections of glowing lights on the lapping waters. But, aside from being tourist attractions and giant disco light echo chambers, these lakes are also an intimate part of the lives of the people living in the surrounding hutongs.

One of the best experiences of our entire trip was Greg's birthday surprise for me, an evening of mahjong lessons with China Reflection. They picked us up from the subway station, where we took a pair of rattly three-wheeled motor-rickshaws through one of those lake-side hutongs, arriving at a family-run mahjong parlor. The small room, just steps from the lake, was barely large enough to hold four automatic mahjong tables (a technological marvel — it's pretty much worth the price of the lesson just to watch these things swallow the jumbled tiles, shuffle them around, and then lift them up in four pristine double rows). Unbeknownst to our guide or us, the owner of this particular parlor was in the habit of making dinner for the neighborhood regulars, and she warmly extended the offer to us.

Dinner was fish, caught fresh in the lake that day, stewed in a five-spice broth, and served with bean sprouts and steamed bread, or mantou. While I can't vouch for the safety of fish caught in an urban lake plied by countless tourist boats, it was tender and delicious, and the generous welcome it signified made the meal one of the most meaningful of our trip. We were pressed to take seconds, our cups of tea were never left empty, and while we had to work through a translator, hopefully our gratitude was as obvious as the welcome. After dinner, the plates were cleared away, and we spent the evening amusing the regulars with our mahjong skills (or lack thereof). Other players leaned over our table between their games and pointed out moves or congratulated good ones, and by the end of the evening, we felt completely at ease despite the language gap.

After that meal, the giant, glittering lake seemed to mean more to me. But there were some diners whose meals were linked even more closely to the lake than ours — the photo is a little blurry, but these folks are eating what appeared to be a twelve-course meal on a tiny wooden boat. What the photo doesn't show at all is how violently this boat was bobbing up and down, and how often those diners had to grab the edge of an errant plate. I'll stick with the lake fish served on land.

Another giant landmark that we got to experience a little more personally was the Great Wall. We hiked from Jinshanling to Simitai. While Simitai is one of the more heavily trafficked site along the wall, Jinshanling is pretty quiet, and the hike between the two is probably the best way to see the wall without a thick frosting of tourists. The wall is exactly as imposing, stunning, and mind-warpingly steep and rugged as you might expect, and there is nothing that brings home the reality of it, and the amount of human effort involved in its construction, like spending a morning walking atop it.

There isn't much to eat on the Great Wall, mostly lukewarm sodas and candy bars, lined up with the piles of t-shirts in the shade of the turrets. But next to the funky tour-bus-stop buffet restaurant at the Simitai end of the hike, there were rows of trees hung with corn cobs, drying in the sun. The beautiful but stark brown and white landscape of the day — wall, scrub, fruit tree, dust cloud, wall, brush, dirt — was broken by the happy yellow of the corn, hanging like celebratory wreaths along the road.

These rows of drying corn, a fairly common sight in the Chinese countryside, made me pause a moment to think about the people who make their living under the Great Wall today, most of them probably selling sodas to tourists, preparing buffet lunches, or driving buses to and from the city. I wished I had the words to ask someone about the corn, about where it was grown, how it was dried, and how it would be used.