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Beijing Bicycle

Riding a bicycle in Beijing is really fun, especially if you like cheating death. My boss gave me his hand-me-down Khan bike so he could upgrade, or downgrade, to a ride with more street cred, but I'm perfectly happy falling in the ex-pat pack with this model. It's big, a plus since being visible is a life or death matter on these streets.

I'm being melodramatic. It was only on day one that I had some potentially life-threatening scrapes. On day two I got my street legs. By day three I was virtually local in my casual disregard for cars with perfectly legitimate objections to my presence in their lane. There actually proved to be very little difference between these three evolutionary steps, besides exponential increases in use of the novelty bell on my right handlebar.

So having a bike means I'll be highly mobile, and hopefully will have some solid field trips documented here over the next few weeks. At least until it gets too cold. I'm a huge advocate of walking, but now that I have this bike I feel like I'm commuting for the first time. What was I thinking before? I guess Boston is much smaller than Beijing.

Now I need to join a bicycle gang.