When we came to Beijing a year ago, we noticed Chinese people staring at us all the time. In our nearest department store, for example, we would be watched as closely as shoplifters, and children would tug at their mothers' dresses to point at us.
It is a disconcerting phenomenon for foreigners, who can't really blend into the background in China, even with the help of a hat and sunglasses. It's the nose that gives us away. We are "big noses", foreign devils.
Now we've stopped noticing. Indeed, we sometimes find ourselves staring at foreign tourists in the streets, noting with curiosity how odd they appear against a background of the Chinese masses.
There are many other things you get used to in time, like the way people cycle or drive into your path (you do it yourself after a while), and how some, especially from the country, stare uncomprehendingly when you try to say a word or two in Chinese. You get accustomed to the lack of privacy. The constant din from traffic and construction and the cacophony in restaurants where the tones in Mandarin make people squawk at each other to be understood.
Indeed, noise is everywhere, even in rural retreats. The Chinese let off fireworks as a way of relaxing. We were deafened by firecrackers among the ice sculptures at Longqing Gorge in winter and again on Saturday at Shidu outside Beijing, where the pinnacle-shaped rock formations echoed to bangers as people bathed and sunned themselves in the river. If you hear a crackling noise like a war going on when driving in the countryside, you know you are near a really beautiful scenic spot.
In common with other foreign residents, we've become experts at getting to the most popular weekend destination, the Great Wall, as that is where every visitor wants to go (it never disappoints). We have learned the hard way that tourist maps are hopeless. The alternative is to ask directions from friendly taxi drivers, as we had to do a dozen times when on the outing to Shidu, on which we were accompanied by Gerry Lenaghan, a holidaying Belfast teacher.
Gerry had been touring China on his own and confirmed the one thing which we have come to appreciate here, that this is one of the safest countries in the world for western visitors, however much of a curiosity we are. Thousands of westerners, many of them young women on their own, are back-packing across China this summer without fretting about personal security.
There is crime of course, and some travellers' Meccas, like Guilin, are rip-off zones, but street robberies or assaults are rare. Beijing, in common with other Asian cities, is pretty safe for foreigners, though the Irish couple who recently had their passports stolen in Tiananmen Square might disagree.
What is hard to get used to is the pollution, and the spitting. On the trip to Shidu, we saw a five-mile wide column of noxious fumes rising from an industrial complex, contaminating the fresh air near Marco Polo Bridge. It is a constant struggle to keep nasal passages clear because of high levels of ozone and sulphurous oxide, though the good news is that the city is ordering a switch to lead-free petrol. There is about 15 per cent less oxygen in the air here, which constantly saps energy. You could once go to oxygen bars for a sniff, but they have fallen out of fashion in the last 12 months.
The censorship of news in the Chinese media is like being deprived of mental oxygen. Even in China's roaring '90s, this is no free market in information. Beijing Scene, a non-political English-language journal of Beijing goings-on, was closed by the authorities during the year. We have to rely on CNN and Rupert Murdoch's Star television, which brings us a constant diet of old Baywatch and Dynasty episodes, which is little compensation.
We have seen many physical changes in one year. The city skyline grows like a neon-fringed organism. Every week, scaffold netting is removed somewhere to reveal shining new palaces of tile and chrome. The boom goes on.
More and more family-run shops and restaurants are also opening as the service industry drives the reforms. We have abandoned the state department store we first went to and the over-priced city centre shops and now patronise Jenny Lou's private shop in Sanlitun district.
This charming little grocery and vegetable store, whose owner and her husband greet regular customers with a cheerful smile and a tolerance of amateurish attempts to say something in Chinese, is so popular with foreign residents that here, especially on a Saturday morning, "big noses" do not feel out of place any more.