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The perfect, early Summer activity in this landlocked city: going to Beijing’s fake beach.

Twenty-five kuai on weekends gave access to 4500 square metres of sand, three water slides and a volleyball set-up in Tuanjiehu Park, tucked in behind the Third Ring Road East.

Wave machines kept teenage lovers in inner tubes entertained for hours in the main pool. In the shallower parts, grinning kids bobbed in swim-caps. They giggled in the spray from a red, poca-dotted mushroom in the centre of the park. The water slides had long queues of goose-pimped flesh. Hundreds turned out on a Sunday, all in high swimming outfits made of course fabric in a fantasia of colours. Smoking, fat lao ban (bosses) eating chuanr (skewers) sat around the outsides scratching themselves and looking generally gross. Kids pissed on the fake, hollow rocks and built elaborate sand things. There were a few girls in bikinis and high-heels posing for studly youngsters. So strange this Malibu pocket, hemmed-in as we were by giant apartment complexes and the Ring Road, one of the busiest roads in China.

We laid around in the water - me, my friends Jenny and Yoni - pretending to be sharks and dumping each other in the water. Yoni put me in shoulder stands. Jenny and I conspired to dack his boardies. On the beach, we got burned, drank tins of Tsingdao, ate hot oranges, and joked about sex and love and relationships like we always did.

"Everyone in Beijing has someone that they really should be with but they are not", Yoni said, his latest love theory. In Beijing, love is strange, obscured always by the potential of flight. It's either cross-cultural, or trans-continental. In such a crowded city, and with the sun beating down on this surreal beach, love takes on these romantic, alienating proportions. The perspective Beijing gives on love is addictive, too. It's the Big Picture.

In Beijing we understand why so much of the word belonging is made up of the word longing.