9/21/2005 03:58:00 PM|||The Zen Master|||Well, actually, I bought it on Sunday, with help from R. to find the most fashionable color. It's a matte dark blue "Forever"-brand bicycle, small enough so that my toes touch the ground when I want them to, and with a cute tulip painted on the frame below the handlebars. But, today was the first time I rode it--to work, from work to Chinese class, and all the way home--and the first time I've even been on a bike in about four years; make that eight years if we're counting any real time or distance. I've never before ridden very far beyond the comfortable enclave that surrounds my suburban home, and I'd never even made it to the point where you ride along with traffic instead of facing the oncoming cars in order to know what's coming your way. And somehow I thought I could try all this for the first time in the chaotic onslaught that is the Beijing bike-riding experience. Well, I made it home alive--and exhilarated.

I figured out that the bike lanes off to the sides of roads were meant to be one-way, that the parking lot in front of McDonald's (Maidanlao in Chinese) costs .09RMB, or about 1 cent, to park your bike under the watchful eye of an attendant while you grab some fries (shutiao) and diet coke (jianyi kele) for lunch, that knocking a water bottle out of a woman's hand while trying to dash across a busy intersection is probably a bad idea, and that I most likely won't crash and sustain massive head trauma despite the fact that I didn't buy a helmet. No one here wears one, and most of them make it to work and back on a daily basis without incident, and traffic, even of the two-wheeled variety, moves so sluggishly that even if one were to fall, I don't think anything permanently damaging would come of it. I'll take a picture of my newest vehicle tomorrow and post it--on this first adventure, I thought it wise to leave my camera at home, in case all went to shit and I flipped over or something. Next time, I won't be so cautious.|||112729034564999373|||Today I bought a bicycle