Debra Bruno

The streets just south of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square are an incongruous mix. Qianmen Street, which shoots straight south from Mao’s Mausoleum and the Great Hall of the People, is a long-standing pedestrian thoroughfare lined with storefronts, now including a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop and a Zara clothing store. The street’s 500-year-old look was refurbished in time for the city’s 2008 Olympics.

Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a not-very-subtle warning to his North Korean allies this week to stop holding the world hostage. But there’s still one place where the Chinese and North Koreans can find some common ground.

As of January 1, Beijing and Shanghai have dropped visa requirements for tourists in town for 72 hours or less. That offers the perfect opportunity for travelers in transit to have a little guilt-free fun. The Great Wall is a little too far for a short visit – plus, it’s winter and the bitter cold winds come from Siberia. Everyone does the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven.

Preparing for a race like the Great Wall Marathon outside of Beijing or the Angkor Wat half marathon in Siem Reap requires a certain ability to ignore reality. For instance, runners who train in Beijing rarely have the chance to jog outside, thanks to routinely unhealthy air quality. My gym in Beijing is overheated and noisy, with men puffing cigarettes inside the building while we pound along on treadmills and stare at CCTV on the television or MTVs “Teen Mom” on our iPads.

An expat lifestyle almost by definition involves a certain amount of time and energy spent searching for the things of home in the sometimes-futile attempt to build a buffer against the strangeness. My husband and I happen to live in an expat-friendly part of Beijing, inside an apartment complex that hosted a Halloween party this year and that puts gaudy Christmas decorations in the lobby of the health club.