By Bill Siggins

It's been a month since we traded the hustle and bustle along with the horn-blaring cacophony of the inner city for the baaing and crowing animal symphony of Beijing's suburbs.

We've left one of the most interesting and convenient neighborhoods in the city, Sanlitun, for one of Beijing's original gated communities a few kilometres inside the 6th Ring Road, about 30 kilometres north.

We've moved to Yuanzhongyuan (YZY), a community of 200 houses and five low-rise apartment buildings in the area known as Beiqijia. Our little community was built about 15 years ago and is one of the city's original bieshu (cottage) developments, a word used in Chinese to describe just about any place where people live in actual houses.

Except for a few glaring differences this could be a community in the suburbs of “Anywhere, US.”

From a Westerner's perspective YZY is a community that seems both bizarre and workable.

A casual stroll around its 13 tree-lined streets is sure to leave Westerners bemused. YZY is obviously attempting to emulate a Western suburban lifestyle but it seems to miss some key points.

The problem is the scale is off. Many of the houses occupy 90 percent of the lot, leaving no room for the classic suburban must-have, a front lawn. The streets of YZY are almost as narrow as an inner-city hutong, apparently defeating much of the purpose of leaving the city for personal space.

Yet while YZY may seem like a bad copy, it turns out that suburbia with Chinese characteristics, works.

Because of its smaller size and higher density, YZY has the feel of a real community. People stroll along the streets in the evening, play chess in the shade and ping pong in the undersized public space and just about everyone, it seems, walks a dog. Here in YZY we not only drive really slowly, we also talk to our neighbors.

At 87, Lao Guo is the oldest – but not by much – of the gang of Chinese chess players who gather every morning to resume their endless round robin of chess.

They always break concentration for hello to the laoxiang (country mate) of Dr Bethune (the Canadian martyr of China's revolution) and a pat on the head of our precocious poodle Yoyo.

The air here is almost sweet and our canine daughter and I have mapped a walking route around the community that is just over five kilometres if we do it three times. Now that we're far from downtown a quick-paced walk to raise the heart rate no longer feels like a health hazard.

YZY is also far from the dreary homogeneous sameness of “Anywhere, US.”

There are a number of palatial, marble-covered monster homes but there are also attached townhouses and low-rise, walk-up apartment buildings. It makes YZY the kind of mixed suburban community that the great sociologist Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said “The point of cities is multiplicity.”

So while life inside the gates of YZY is certainly pleasant, the chores of daily life out here in Changping district have been the best and worst experience.

Outside our back gate, on odd numbered weekdays, is a huge farmers' market that stretches along the side of the road for more than a kilometre.

Bargaining with a farmer is such an earthy way to shop. The colors, odors, sounds, produce, spices, snacks, hanging meat, live fish, Chinese medicines, bolts of cloth, helium-filled balloons and crush of people are a sensory overload. Everything seems right off the vine. Since the weather is nice and the novelty hasn't worn off, market days are delightful.

At the other end of the spectrum, I may have discovered one of the worst places on earth when we made the mistake of grocery shopping at a Carrefour store last weekend.

The blaring announcements are painfully loud and sharp elbows are a must around the discount counter. Even with 59 cashiers it still takes half an hour to check out. I've seen couples tag-team shop: one stands in line while the other races through the aisles dodging other shoppers before running back and handing off a basket full of goods to the partner who is now at the head of the line.

I doubt very much there's an equivalent to this kind of shopping madness anywhere in France.

So, we're learning to avoid the worst and enjoy the best of Beijing's burbs.

After years of residing in the core of one of the world's biggest metropolises, there's something delightful about being woken in the morning by a rooster's call and looking down to see a flock of sheep passing along the back street.

The author is the founder of R.D. Communications. He can be reached at billsiggins@realdogcomm.cn