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The afternoon hours between school-break and dinner are the most fun in Beijing. Especially on a bike in the sun. Students double on bicycles in tracksuits and horde into shops for confectionery and cokes. People are released. There's forward movement everywhere. Boyfriends and girlfriends kiss on streets.

I join the tail end of one flock heading into a park, north and west of the Drum and Bell towers, across the Second Ring Road. It's my favourite park in Beijing, Rendinghu Gongyuan.

A Greek pavilion leading to a terraced rose garden is the park's welcome. A hollowed-out piano, keys browned and jangly, sits underneath Aphrodite, pert atop her white column.

Behind Greece BC, a soviet fountain structure, copper and tiling. A series of elevated bridges pass a mosiac of the capital's urban plan. Further still, the park opens out into a fantastical water park of slides and interconnected pools, which in early summer are still dry, revealing pipes. A menagerie of primary-coloured concrete animals would, I imagine, sprout water from their heads. Their eyes now look haunted by children's play.

Up further, at the top of the park, as if I have journeyed millennia and come to the future: six brown mushroom-like sculptures topped by long, slender spires. Kites have splatted on the Kubrick spires and hang there now like dead moths. Zooming around underneath, kids in electric toy cars compete in helmets.

It's so very unlike Beijing. There's a calm out the back. Grandfathers send up kites on that one gust of wind to surely make them fly. Seniors in wheelchairs park for an afternoon in the regenerating sun before they are inspected and collected by carers and cousins.

The grass is freshly green and long. There is a woman singing opera around the colonnades doing daily exercises. School students trade cards. Mothers come home from work with vegetables sticking out of string bags. It's expansive, green, peaceful. I take up a whole bench and crave lying on the grass like I would in Sydney. I nap in the long afternoon light and wake reddened.

I walk back out through the park and collect my bike to join the extraordinary activity of Beijing twilight. It's a time when families reunite and a game is struck, while someone finishes off the shop-front repairs and water begins the boil. It's the real time of enterprise, and to be witness to the sheer logistics of this city talking, moving, is enlivening. I want to cheer as I peddle in amongst it all. At the people power, the peddle power.

Soon everyone will eat and that will mark the beginning of the quiet that will last til morning.