An excerpt on an essay about a trip to China for two conferences in summer 2016.

The countdown began as soon as I was on the ground.  So far, my flight had landed on time, my passage through customs and the Chinese border was as smooth as I could imagine, and now I rifled through my backpack to find the travel directions written in Mandarin that our hosts had prepared to present to a cab driver.  90 minutes remained for the ni hao while passing the paper to the driver and settling into the back seat; 70 minutes remained as we passed the toll at the intersection with the fifth ring road with lanes and lanes of stopped traffic during rush hour; 50 minutes remained as the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium came in and then out of the frame of my window; until finally 30 minutes remained as the cab rounded the fourth ring road and settled due west of the Forbidden City at the valet stand while I exchanged a xie xie accompanied by hundreds of Yuan for the ride.  Bounding two or three at a time up the stairs, then past the buffet with the first early risers shuffling from hot plate to pastries to coffee stand, to my room on the mezzanine level, ready for me though only a shade after 7:00 am.  Backpack stripped of non-essentials, just my camera and passport remained, I stepped out the front door of the hotel, with less than 15 minutes remaining to catch the tour bus before it departed from the Center for Future High Energy Physics.

I set off on a run on the pedestrian path parallel to Fuxing Road, an eight-lane boulevard slicing through the tall, narrow apartment buildings with each flat’s balcony bearing a rug on the railing and a UHF antenna bent like a divining rod toward open sky, for the mile that separated me from the buses.  Morning in Beijing’s high summer created a haze that was not quite either fog nor smoke, muffling the heartbeat of the city, its rumbling breath of traffic, and deliberately revealing the path only a hundred feet ahead while I pounded on, cradling my rocking backpack from behind, out of phase with my feet.  Hundreds of meters above the pavement was clear, hot sky and the further I ran the wetter and wetter I became, collecting both humidity and undried sweat, while my hands moved from my backpack to wiping my brow to peeling off the shirt stuck to my chest in hopes some fresher air might circulate through.  The path was still mostly absent of people, but a statue of Mao glared disapprovingly from across a vacant lot while approaching the intersection beyond which lay the Center.  The conference website had stated that the buses would be parked near the guest house, of which the only information I had received was a low-resolution map and my own coordination with Google, so I veered right, sprinting through the main lawn, around a line of tan brick buildings, to an alley lined with cedars where I finally slowed.  The drivers of the two buses had just started engines, but the door of the first bus was open and I boarded, saying hi to the two organizers seated in the front row while making a dignified attempt at decreasing my heart rate and hyperventilation, but completely giving up on the drowned state of my clothes, and flopped into an open seat.