You notice the bizarre trees as soon as you exit the Beijing airport. Their odd, Seussian shapes flank the highway, many rows deep, and for miles they're almost all you can see.

The trees are tall, far beyond the sapling stage, but they have either stubs of branches or no branches at all, just intermittent clusters of leaves along the trunk where branches ought to be. Mostly ginkgos, they stand only a few feet apart.

They look, frankly, like a vast army of chopsticks stuck in the mud. They're new, probably planted in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

Pittsburgh Symphony musicians who had visited China in 1987 under Lorin Maazel's leadership marveled at the changes they saw on this tour, which ended Thursday. Never having been to Asia, I accompanied my husband, a symphony member, with some trepidation, but found myself fascinated by a country clearly in the throes of rapid transformation.

As you move from the airport, past the Olympic Village -- there's the Water Cube! and the Bird's Nest stadium! -- to Beijing's vast, gridlocked downtown, the trees become more mature, but everywhere, without exception, they are planted much too close together to ever grow into their natural form.

Those that don't survive the harsh treatment are easily replaced. If public horticulture expresses something about a people, what does this method say about the world's most populous nation?

The trees' purpose, it seems, is inseparable from their sheer numbers. Eventually, they will shade the sidewalks, soften the endless concrete and, in theory, clean the air -- though every leaf would have to function as an industrial-strength scrub-brush to make much of a dent in the visible, hovering, eye-stinging pollution.

Musicians visiting for the second time say that in two decades, the proportion of bicycles to cars on Beijing streets has simply reversed. The city's very recent prosperity means that Audis and VWs sprinkle the swarm of Hyundai Elantras, but all these new drivers steer as though they were still maneuvering bikes. Bikes with horns.

On one gut-wrenching taxi ride, we gasped as our driver honked impatiently at the car in front of him. It was a police car, and we were at that moment -- no kidding -- on one side of Tiananmen Square. As the police moved right to let us pass, our cabbie leaned over to glare at the officers. They ignored him, laughing at something else.

We had laughed earlier at the obviously never-used "Complaints and Suggestions" box just past the customs agents at the airport: What fool is going to be filmed submitting criticism of officious Chinese bureaucrats? But maybe things were loosening more than we'd imagined, and in unexpected ways.

Either Chinese cars have unusually bad radios, or some of our cabbies were listening to unauthorized talk radio stations broadcasting from far away.

Staffers at the Beijing Westin hotel wore name tags that provided a fact about the person wearing it and, often, a Westernized name. One bellboy's name tag said, "My passion is sports." He called himself "LeBron" and was eager to discuss his American basketball hero.

The English signage everywhere was the government's pre-Olympics effort, of course, but the Ohio State logo emblazoned across the seat of a girl's sweatpants was her own fashion choice, just one of many.

Before this trip I'd heard, on Pittsburgh radio, that Christian businessmen are being allowed to operate openly in China these days. But I was still surprised to see a brand-new VW Beetle parked across a Shanghai sidewalk, its rear end bearing the Christian fish symbol with the word "Jesus" inside it.

A few blocks away was the landmark Old China Hand Reading Room, where the book display just inside the front door prominently featured a hymnal, opened to the tune "Blessed Assurance."

I was amazed, but throughout our week in Beijing and Shanghai, the Chinese often seemed amazed by their own country, too. While many stared at us as though they'd never seen Westerners before, they also stared at the skyscrapers, stores and traffic. They took each other's photos posed next to big ads for luxury goods -- not the posters with George Clooney or Nicole Kidman, the one with just the $40,000 watch.

The worldwide recession is reportedly costing countless thousands of Chinese their jobs and forcing them from the glittering cities back to impoverished countryside. Now that they've tasted -- and lost -- the prosperity possible with a liberalized economy, will they foment for greater change?

Modern China is a place of contrast and contradiction. On the same highways flanked by rows of tortured-looking trees, roses of every possible hue fill the median strips, mile after mile, delicate blossoms somehow thriving in the inhospitable air.