Beijing. My second trip to China. The first, a trip to Greater Shanghai in 2001. Now it's 15 years later, a good friend has been living and working in Beijing, and I've got a week off to visit him, see the city, see how China has changed and is changing.

The grilled cheese place in SeaTac, I get “I love your jacket!” because I'm wearing my leather jacket, and unlike any other piece of clothing I've ever owned, this leather jacket just fits me.

Getting on the flight. The antsyness of international flights and the sense that you might get stuck next to someone you’d rather not sit next to for 12 hours. Then, a movie and an album in, look to the right and there is this massive glacier spilling into the sea.

My friend hands me the mask in the airport. The airport, all people waiting with signs, we come out bleary eyed and Sy hands me a mask. And then I step outside and smell why.

My friend then forgets his wallet in the back of the cab. I take off running, inexpcliably hauling my suitcase with me, and go clattering down the night suburban Beijing street yelling at the taxi to pull over. And he does. We get the wallet back.

All the deliciousness. I ought to build a collage. Some of the highlights:

• Ten RMB Breakfast at the Jianbing stand: light, black sesame seed dough wrapped around eggs and scallions
• Humble banquets and an exquisite banquet on a blowout night, a few ingredients ubiquitous: Eggplant. Fish. Fresh salads and slaws. Noodles. Crepes.
• Sheep organ soup, almond pastry, tea egg. Nescafe. Ah yeah, what a breakfast of champions.

The teahouse. Teadrunk at the teahouse. International ideas of solving health, solving belonging, solving meaning, or just importing manufactured goods for sale on another storefront website because catalogs and storefronts is what I'm building at work these days.

Taxi drivers who give zero fucks. Merging in, muttering low curses at trucks or buses, guttural utterings in dialects my friends can't understand, cigarette with an inch of ash dangling.

The football. I brought along a mini football, one of those balls you get from a bin at a Walmart for $7.99. We threw it everywhere. Locals would laugh, watch, and want to join in. Some of them were pretty good! At catching, at least. Nobody knows how to throw a football when they've never held one. I can only hope we brought a little cultural understanding: throwing the football around in China.

The first time I'd been to China, it was 2003, the height of post-9/11 scrutiny, and I tried to bring a football along but they confiscated it at security. So bringing the football this time was an act of redemption. Or revenge. Depending on how you look at it.

One afternoon we went for a massage, and then a cupping. I love out-of-band things like that. There's only so many Mona Lisas and Towers of Pisa you can see. And we didn't go to the Great Wall, either. That's a thing with me: in 1999 I went to Salisbury, but refused to go out to Stonehenge. Many times I've been to Paris without stopping by the Eiffel Tower. There's a thing in me that can't stand the cringe of The Big Tourist Destination. It's a weakness, an infantile sense of embarrassment that probably results in feeling like I'm superior and other such narcissism. But damn, I cannot stand the big tourist site.

Nonetheless, I did go to Tiananmen Square. Wanted to see it, revel in it, remember the day of the tanks, that day in 1989 when that tank - at the same moment Soviet era was ending in glorious revolution and the putting down of arms - stopped for that man. 

Driving the fishing boat in the middle of the Yellow Sea. Riding bikes, hanging on to the backs of mopeds. Long solo walks down Beijing backstreets, the Dawn Patrol.

So how has China changed? Wasn't that was I was here to learn? Travel is like this: we spend a week or even a day in a place and we think we know something. We go to a craft brewery - which I did, Great Leap Brewery in the hutongs - and we think, wow, they're like us now. Or we observe that we can get by in shops and cafes with a few words of Mandarin and then mostly English, and we think, wow, so international. And then we come home and resume our lives.

The trip, like all trips, comes to an end. Loading onto a long flight. Back to Seattle. Back to PDX. Back to a cozy bed. Back to day-to-day, the workaday, back to fall in Portland, Oregon.