I’ve been sitting at the keyboard debating whether I’m a bike snob. On the one hand, I think if someone enjoys riding a bike – any kind of bike – that’s great. I’m happy for them. But on the other hand, I don’t really care to be near anyone riding one of those folding bikes, which are becoming outrageously popular in China. Wait, I should clarify something. If someone is commuting on one of those things or running errands or just tooling around like David Byrne does, that’s fine. I appreciate the utility of the machines. But I’m troubled by people – mostly men in their 20s and 30s in China – who ride them for sport (like here). And I don’t like how they try to adopt our roadie attire. They should learn from the fixie crowd and develop their own style.
A few months ago, a couple of foldies (Is that what we call them?) popped out of a side road and started tailing me. One of them stayed just a centimeter off my rear wheel, pedaling those donut wheels at an annoyingly high cadence. They didn’t seem to understand the common etiquette. If you’re going to suck a stranger’s wheel, you should at least introduce yourself, say hello. It was a bit unnerving because I had doubts about their riding skills and was just waiting for a wheel-touch accident. I finally dropped the two dweebs on a series of hills. In my mind, what they were doing was kind of like a guy in a VW Beetle – a cute and clever vehicle – tailing a guy in a Porsche. It’s just something you don’t do. It’s dorky and irritating. It’s like stepping onto a tennis court with a raquetball raquet. That’s OK if it’s your thing, but don’t try to volley with me.
On Sunday, I was riding home on a stretch of road with heavy, chaotic traffic (a Mad Max situation). It’s usually a spot where I just ride to survive. The objective is just to get through it safely. I passed two guys on folding bikes (They always seem to ride in pairs. Hmmmm), and they started racing me. It was a real dilemma for me because I would really hate to see two foldies get the best of me. But then again, I’d really hate to crash my bike and injure myself competing with geeks. It was a classic pride vs. commonsense conflict. One of the guys was riding like an idiot, weaving recklessly between cars and taking other risks. He eventually shot through a hole in the traffic and opened up a hug gap. I was tempted to chase, but I decided to just let them go.
Am I a bike snob? I’m still not sure. I’m certainly a grump. And I have strong opinions. Maybe I’m best described as a cycling segregationist. I’m not sure if that’s worse.
The convenience store near the base of Bapian Mountain. They had no idea what a Snickers bar is.
No long ride would be complete – or even possible – without at least one stop at a convenience store, or “bian li dian” in Mandarin. We’ll take a break to suck down a can of Coke for a sugar and caffeine boost. We’ll fill our water bottles and snarf down a Snickers bar to avoid bonking – that awful light-headed, weak feeling when the muscles have no calories left to burn. Sometimes – especially on long solo rides – it’s just nice to have a chat with the counter clerks, who are usually quick to smile, curious and friendly.
In rural areas, the clerk just works behind a cluttered wooden desk. Her husband wore a black leather jacket and just lurked around the store. He wouldn't get in the photo.
When on holiday in the United States, I feel intense culture shock when I go into convenience stores because I’m not used to seeing such a dizzying selection of goodies. Often the counter clerk works behind a fortress of candy bars, gum, chips, energy bars and millions of other snacks. In China, little effort is made to display the goods. The clerk usually stands or sits behind a dusty little desk and stuffs the money in the drawer.
Chicken feet for only 50 cents!
The store at Bapian Mountain didn’t sell any imported goods. But they had almost every chicken part imaginable, neatly packaged in plastic, ready to be eaten in your car. I’ve eaten chicken feet before. Once I was at a traditional dim sum place where all the dishes were put on carts and wheeled around to the tables. I suspected that some of the carts weren’t making it to my table because the waitresses thought a foreigner wouldn’t eat what was being offered. So when the chicken feet cart appeared, I said in a loud voice: “I’ll take a plate!” That attracted some attention, and all the other carts started stopping at my table. Chicken feet taste pretty good. They’re just a lot of work. Too chewy and bony for me.
A vacuum-packed chicken leg. Why hasn’t KFC thought of this? The clerk assured me that I could eat it out of the bag.
I wish I would have asked the clerk how to pronounce "Shzhg." It's not Mandarin, and it's certainly not English. It needs at least one vowel.
Almost every convenience store sells Coke, Pepsi and Sprite. And more than half of them will carry Gatorade. I think that’s impressive. The problem is that the drinks are stored in feeble refrigerators (below) that keep the beverages just a degree or two colder than room temperature.
There really wasn’t much on offer at the convenience store at Bapian Mountain. Soy sauce, biscuits and instant noodles.
This store (below) is one that we stop at often on the way home from the university district in Guangzhou. I visited the place recently while bonking hard at the end of a 100-kilometer ride.
I bought a Coke and some saltine crackers before taking a seat to chat with the clerk, who was a real sweetheart. Somebody walked by and yelled at her, “Hey, you have a foreign customer!” She replied, “Yeah, and he talks, too!”
This guy in the camo uniform was also taking a break. He belonged to the neighborhood security force. I asked him how the force works, and he explained that he was paid by the local government but he wasn’t part of the police force. I asked him why it was necessary to have him if police also patrolled the area. He just said, “You’ve asked a very deep question that I can’t answer.”
There wasn’t a lot to eat: crackers, cookies, peanuts and sunflower seeds. If a store has any kind of imported junk food, it’s usually Snickers, Dove chocolate bars, M&Ms and Pringles. When I was studying in central China in the early 90s, we thought we were lucky when a local department store began selling M&Ms. They were displayed in a glass case like jewelry. Now they’re everywhere. Progress.
I saw several of these signs last weekend on the long descent on Nankun Mountain. They always crack me up because they say so much about the Chinese approach to driving. In China, the most important safety device in a car isn’t the brake or a gas pedal being operated by a sane and sensible driver. Nope, it’s the horn. When in doubt, honk your horn!
Another thing that I like about this is that the signs warn drivers of a blind curve when the curve is already clearly in view. Drivers really need to see this sign about 20 meters earlier, especially on a wet road.
In China, when you’re approaching a blind turn, you don’t need to slow down. All you need to do is toot your horn. And that’s exactly what everyone does! They certainly don’t slow down. If they don’t hear any honking, they rip around these corners, often straying into the other lane. On Saturday, a van decided to pass us by moving into the other lane just as it was about to round the corner.
I’ve been climbing in the mountains in Taiwan this week, and I noticed that the Taiwanese don’t encourage horn honking. Instead, they put signs ahead of tricky sections of roads urging drivers to slow down. In most cases, they paint a huge Chinese character that says “slow” on the road before dangerous curves.
I think the Chinalogical explanation for the horn-honking signs would be: Right, it’s common sense that when you’re driving down a twisty-curvy mountain road, you MUST drive slowly. Do people really need to be reminded of this? Isn’t it a natural reflex? What people DO need to be reminded of is to beep their horn just as a courtesy to oncoming traffic. You can never use your horn enough! An extra toot or two never hurt anyone.
The problem with the Chinalogic is that many drivers seem to assume that if they aren’t hearing anyone beeping, there is no oncoming traffic to worry about and they can continue speeding around the corner. I’ve seen this happen too many times.
UPDATE: A reader with an impressive grasp of Chinalogic made an astute comment on Waffles & Steel on Facebook. I think this is the best explanation so far of what might be going on with the horn honking. The reader said, “I’m not sure if this still holds in Chinalogic, but a decade or so ago, bus drivers routinely killed the engine and careened down tortuous mountain roads with their lights off in neutral at night – to conserve fuel, you understand. It seems that when rounding a corner in a silent behemoth flashing no light beams, it’s the least you could do to toot on the horn to warn oncoming vehicles of your existence.”
Riding down a road that’s heading straight into a mountain range. Feelings of trepidation about the pain ahead. Self doubt about whether you can really get to the top this time. Worries about the constant threat of mishaps, mechanicals, danger. It’s all racing around your brain as you get closer and closer to the mountains. It’s one of my favorite parts of a ride. In the picture above, the monster covered in clouds on the left side of the photo is Nankun Shan (“shan” means mountain in Chinese). It probably offers the best climbing in Guangzhou. Last Saturday, I rode it with my fellow explorer, Brendan. In about five hours, we covered about 110 kilometers in rainy and often bone-chilling weather.
Every ride in China is an adventure for us. A journey full of challenges and the unexpected. The last time we did Nankunshan, construction crews had ripped up a long section of road to the base of the mountain. All we had to ride on was a bumpy, slippery ribbon of mud, sand and rocks. We were hoping the project was completed. We were disappointed. There were a couple kilometers of road that were still unfinished, and we had to shift into cyclocross mode and power over it. Our bikes quickly became filthy and the gritty mud clogged up my brakes.
The morning drizzle made matters worse, and sometimes we had cars and buses riding on our wheels. There was no room for error. With a slip and a fall, we could quickly find ourselves beneath a vehicle.
We finally made it to the front side of Nankunshan, a 17-kilometer climb that kind of ebbs and flows. Some sections will dunk you into the red zone, but you won’t be there for too long before the road levels out a bit and you can recover. The gradient isn’t too painfully steep. But Brendan found a side road that offered a chain-busting, quad-shredding 1-kilometer climb.
He bravely completed the nasty climb, while I wussied out, fearing I’d pull a muscle or pop my chain, which should have been replaced a few months ago.
Here’s a profile of the climb:
Source: Banovic Data & Graphics Inc.
The climb up the front side of Nankunshan ends at this ornate gate.
Beyond the gate, there’s a parking lot, where hawkers have set up rickety stands and sell all kinds of things to the tour bus crowds. The gal below is selling “Tofu Flowers,” a type of custard made from bean curd.
There was another woman selling these critters: rats – with their heads and tails still attached – that have been dried, smoked and flattened.
While I was looking at the rat jerky, an elderly Chinese tourist walked up to the booth and said, “Oh, rats!” She spoke with a burry Beijing accent, so I asked her if people up North eat rats like this. She scrunched up her nose and said, “Oh no, we would never eat rats!” The Cantonese are famous for being adventurous eaters. The gal below assured me that rats are very tasty and are good for your hair.
We often ride down the back side of Nankunshan, then turn around and do an out-and-back course. On Saturday, though, we took a different route that was more of a roller coaster ride with a bunch of climbs that were tough but no longer than 3 or 4 kilometers.
The scenery was mind-blowingly lush. It was like we were riding through a jungle. A thousand shades of green. Ferns, elephant grass, palm trees with massive leaves and bamboo galore.
This is the biggest tree I’ve ever seen in China. A whole colony of Ewoks could live in it. Usually when a tree gets this tall, the Chinese will chop it down. It’s dangerous or blocks a road project or it’s just too damn irresistible. With all that wood, you can smoke a million rats!
I’ve never seen this before in China. The massive tree trunk had a cavity – or a grotto – that people were using as a shrine. They tacked up prayer ribbons and had burned incense.
A village in a mountain valley. I would love to buy one of these homes and use it for weekend climbing training camps.
A narrow passage at the top of one of the climbs.
We always stop in one village that has a long line of shops that cater to the tour bus crowd. Each shop sells exactly the same thing. Things go in and out of style and season. Once, the hot item was pickled hornets displayed in huge jars. This time, everyone was selling bamboo shoots, which are delicious.
The long descent off Nankunshan was more painful than the ascent. That’s because the weather never warmed up and the rain was worse. It was like standing under a cold shower. My shoulders and back started seizing up on me. I started worrying about muscle spasms. My quads felt like semi-thawed hamburger meat by the time I got to the bottom of the mountain and had to get through the muddy, ripped-up section of road again.
By the time we plowed over the muddy road, our bikes were filthy, and we weren’t looking forward to putting them into the mini van. Then we met this happy-looking guy above. He had a roadside car-washing operation. He sprayed down both of our bikes for less than $1. Then he asked us to join him for tea! Like I said, there’s always an adventure.
I was just starting the climb up Bapian Mountain when I came across this curious piece of rubbish. I got me thinking about something I read a couple years ago. An American guy racing in the Tour of South China blogged about what was apparently his first visit to China. One day he posted a photo of a big billboard that showed a scantily clad lingerie model. He was surprised to see such an overtly sexual ad in China, a communist country he thought would be extremely prudish and puritanical. I guess he thought he would just see women in baggy blue Mao suits buttoned up to their necks.
Sure, the Chinese can be conservative about sexual matters. But in so many other ways, they are OUT OF CONTROL. The government often turns a blind eye to the vibrant sex trade in southern China and most other parts of the country. Police are paid off. Officials are often the best customers. Occasionally, there’s a crackdown. But pretty much, it’s business as usual everyday. I’m talking about brothels that are disguised as “sauna” and “massage” joints. Many of them in Guangzhou are huge operations that are lit up like Las Vegas casinos at night. Pornography is sold on the streets by guys who whisper, “Psst…sexy DVD?” when they walk by you. I frequently get text messages on my mobile phone from outfits promising “relaxation.” I’ve stayed in numerous hotels – some of them with five-star ranking – where at about 10 p.m., the phone rings and there’s a sweet voice on the other end asking me if I require service. Often, when I’m walking to my bus after work, a young guy will approach me and slip a business card into my hand. The card with have 2-3 thumbnail photos of topless women, and there will be a phone number I can call for service. There’s also a little “menu” that says “office girls, virgins, Russian models, factory girls…” Sometimes, I’ll open my office in the morning and find that overnight someone slipped one of the cards under my door. I’ve got a whole stack of them in my file cabinet. I’ve been saving them like baseball cards to give to a friend as a gag gift.
I began translating the titles and quickly realized that my vocabulary for Chinese sexual slang is severely limited. I'm truly a bike geek. I'll take a stab at the main title, though. Errrr, is it "Swap your wife, swap your addiction?" I warmly welcome any corrections or better translations!
Getting a massage is an important part of cycling culture. After a long ride, it’s a terrific feeling to have a well-trained masseuse soften up your muscles and push out all the lactic acid and other nasty stuff from your legs. Although massages are cheap in China (oh, about $10-15), I rarely get them. It’s silly, but I have a hard time working up enough nerve to go into a place that I haven’t established is “legitimate” or not. I’ve been in a situation where I said I just wanted a “healthy massage” but I kept getting the sales pitch for the “happy ending.” It’s not relaxing when every 10 minutes you have to say, “No, really, I just want a simple massage.”
Once I went to a massage palace in Macau, the former Portuguese enclave in southern China that is now the only place in the country where casino gambling is legal. After I entered the place, I was seated in a large room with row after row of reclining chairs with TVs and women serving tea. A couple of Chinese gamblers sat next to me and they told the manager they were interested in female company. Almost immediately, a long line up of young ladies – all beautiful but apparent surgically enhanced – appeared and the men began shopping. They picked a couple and slipped off into a private massage room.
The manager wasn’t happy when I said that I just wanted a “healthy massage.” He said, “OK, that’s fine. But you can’t choose the girl!” He sent me off to a room with a stocky middle-aged woman who looked like she could have been picking cabbages in Sichuan a week earlier. She was a bruiser. The first thing she did was remove her shoes, climb onto the table and start walking up and down my back. Crunch, crunch, crunch. It wasn’t what I call healthy.
I suspect the person who watched the DVD also painted this on the road.
The Chinese sensibility continues to mystify me. Their aesthetics and relationship with nature are so difficult to understand. I took these pictures at Bapian Mountain. As you climb the mountain, there are beautiful rock faces (Is that the right term?) where construction crews cut through stone when building the road. The sad thing is that on many of the rocks, officials have painted slogans urging people to prevent fires.
"Beware of starting fires with cigarettes"
What seems bizarre to me is that they spent millions building this highly technical road that winds its way 7 kilometers up this mountain just to get to some type of telecom station. The road is really an engineering marvel. Yet, they decided not to spend a little money on signs telling people not to carelessly toss their cigarette butts. Instead, they decided to ruin the beauty of these rocks by painting on them. Still, the only type of trash you see on the road are cigarette butts (though I did find something else that’s really interesting and I’ll write about it later).
"Prevent fires!"
I try really hard to see things from the Chinese point of view. Here’s my best stab at the Chinalogic this time: “If we build a sign, someone is just going to tear it down or the wind will blow it away. Without the sign, people will start flicking their ciggy butts again and spark a brush fire that threatens the city below. Tens of thousands of lives could be in danger. We could be blamed for not creating a really durable sign that warns the masses about causing fires. So considering the threat, it’s OK to create an indestructible sign by spray painting a few rocks. Most of the others will remain in their natural state, so there’s plenty left to admire. Like the protagonist in ‘Crime and Punishment’ said: One crime, a thousand good deeds!”
Switchbacks galore. Stunning mountaintop views. A mellow average 7.3 percent gradient. Almost no traffic. Bapian Mountain is incredible. I knew I was in for a treat. I saw pictures of the climb a few days before Saturday’s ride. But the real thing far exceeded my already-high expectations. That’s such a wonderful feeling.
Bapian Mountain is in Qingyuan, a third-tier city about a 1.5 hour drive north of Guangzhou. Qingyuan is a mildly industrial town – big enough for a KFC restaurant – that seems to be shifting into tourism. Mountain valleys were crowded with hot spring resorts and restaurants. There was a small river that’s used for tubing and rafting. But for me, of course, the best attraction is the 7.5 kilometer climb (see profile below) up Bapian. The insanely technical, twisty-curvy road leads to some kind of signal intelligence station or telecom tower. Again, it’s another one of those things that could have been built by the Dharma Initiative.
I don’t recall seeing any guardrails along any part of the climb. In some spots, the road runs across a ridge, with steep drop offs on each side of the road.
We only saw one car – an SUV – on the road. However, there were a few motorcycles ridden by guys who were apparently illegally harvesting bamboo shoots, which people love to eat here. I’m quite fond of them myself. You’ve got to be careful with the motorcycles because the Chinese like to cut their engines when they’re descending to save gas. So you can’t hear them coming, and it’s easy to collide with them when they come flying around the blind corners.
My friend Brendan discovered this climb. He’s done more exploring in this part of China than any other expat cyclist that I know. He’s also an incredible climber.
Dancing on the pedals close to the top.
The ride started with a classic gawkfest. Our mini van parked near a roadside chicken coop. The three guys (above) watched us slip into our bike kit. They even watched as we rubbed lotion on our butts to guard against saddle sores. In my culture, if a man is dressing near you, you move away, turn the other way or at least avert your eyes. In China, you light up a cigarette and move in for a front seat view. The funny thing is that the chickens didn’t gawk at us. The guy in the wine-colored jacket on the far left was the most shameless.
I don’t know if it was fog or pollution or a bit of both, but it’s too bad we didn’t have a clear view because the scenery is spectacular. I kept getting mad at my camera for only capturing a fraction of the beauty.
A mountain goat’s paradise. The road just goes everywhere. I saw the Google Earth picture (below) before the ride and couldn’t believe the climb could really have so many switchbacks. It’s really a mind-blowing experience for a guy who grew up in one of the world’s flattest places.
Source: Banovic Graphics Inc.
Brendan was doing the climb one day and was startled when a metal hoe came crashing down on the road about 10 feet from him. There was a small group of women working on a ridge above him. They were preparing to descend the mountain and just started tossing their tools down onto the road without checking if anyone was there. It’s just typical for China.
The scrap-collecting woman was carefully stacking a bunch of wood-framed windows in the bike lane, leaning them against the metal roadside barrier. Just as I swerved around her and pedaled past, she whipped out some type of metal tool and started shattering all the glass in the windows. Almost instantly, there was a pile of shards in the bike lane. It was another one of those “Is this really happening?” moments. I experience them on almost every ride.
I stopped and fished out my camera from my back jersey pocket and started shooting pictures of her. She had her back to me and didn’t see what I was doing. I wanted a good face shot, so I rode over to her other side. When she saw what I was doing, SHE WENT BALLISTIC! Screeching in Cantonese, she fired off a burst of obscenities. She also grabbed a piece of scrap wood and started approaching me.
I’ve already mentioned one Waffles & Steel rule: If you’re gawking at me, I can take your picture. There’s another rule: If you’re doing something that’s dangerous, idiotic and most likely illegal in the street, I’m sorry but I’m probably going to take your picture.
I don’t know what set me off, but I started yelling at her. I shouted, “How can you do this in the street? Don’t you love China? Don’t you love the motherland?” It’s a new tactic I learned from the government: Appeal to a person’s sense of patriotism. It’s probably a stupid idea. The people probably don’t get it. The woman probably thought: “I’m just trying to quickly collect this scrap and get it out of every one’s way. Why is this crazy foreigner talking about loving the motherland?”
I figured out why she broke the glass. She had two big nylon bags. She planned to break up the window frames and stuff them in one bag. The broken glass was going into the other bag, though she had no broom or dustpan to make sure all the shards were cleared away. The odd thing was that her means of transport was a bike. Wouldn’t you think she would be more sensitive about keeping a bike lane free of sharp debris? Nah, it’s the common attitude here: I’ll do what I want to do. Screw everyone else.
As we yelled at each other, a small crowd of people gathered on the sidewalk. In their eyes, I surely looked ridiculous and weird. I doubt they could see the pile of broken glass from the sidewalk. All they saw was a foreigner in lycra on a fancy bike yelling at a poor scrap-collecting woman about loving the motherland. I felt stupid again about losing my cool. What I most regretted, though, was being so busy shouting at the woman that I missed the best picture. I would have loved to have had a tight shot of the woman’s eyes bulging out of her head as she shrieked at me.
For several months, I’ve walked past the “F” wall and wondered when someone would remove the graffiti. Then last month, a few times a week, I’d stop to take photos of people passing the wall. Last week, I blogged about it. A couple days later, someone finally tried to cover up the obscenity. The workmanship really wouldn’t meet the standards in a place like Germany, but for China, it was OK. There’s a saying in Chinese that describes a popular attitude. It’s: “Cha bu duo jiu hao le,” which I would clumsily translate as: “Just about right is good enough” or “OK is good enough” (or “It doesn’t need to be perfect”).
Why did they wait until now to clean off the graffiti? Perhaps it’s something they’ve been meaning to do for a long time. One important thing I failed to mention in my initial post was that the neighborhood is undergoing a beautification campaign. Last month, the buildings were covered with scaffolding, and crews were replacing the metal cages over balconies. But if they were going to the trouble and expense to upgrade the balcony cages, why wouldn’t they deal with the graffiti sooner? I don’t think my blog post shamed them into finally addressing the “F” wall. But at the risk of sounding too self important, I think it’s very possible that my interest in the wall inspired folks to get rid of the “F” word.
I think foreigners – especially those with European or African features – must always keep in mind that when they’re in public, they’re probably being watched very closely. People might not be gawking at you, but they will be watching. I like to think of China as a nation of eavesdroppers and observers. Eyes and ears are everywhere. And in such a densely populated place, word of mouth travels fast. I’m sure that news quickly spread that a weird foreigner was keenly interested in the “F” wall and even taking pictures of it. Most likely it eventually got to the neighborhood committee, government-backed councils that monitor households in each neighborhood.
These committees seem less powerful than in the hardcore Communist days when a negative comment about Mao could quickly land you in the gulag. When I was studying in the central city of Zhengzhou in 1990, I would have to register with the neighborhood committee representative – a surly old lady – at the gate of my Chinese friend’s apartment building every time I visited her. In the old days, the neighborhood committee probably would have called the cops on me for taking photos of the “F” wall. That didn’t happen this time, but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t being watched by someone.
Bus back! Not much room for error on Stanley Gap Road, near Repulse Bay.
One of my all-time favorite climbs is one that I’ve never done before on a bike. It’s on Stanley Gap and Wong Chong Nai Gap roads, which go across and up the southern side of Hong Kong Island and cross the island’s spine before connecting with Stubb’s Road, which takes you into the city.
Another tight fit. Note to engineers: A couple extra inches on the shoulder would be appreciated next time.
I love any road with “Gap” in its name. These roads are fantastic because they twist and turn as they hug the side of the mountain. They provide stunning views of the South China Sea, coves with sailboats bobbing in turquoise water, mansions, curvy beaches, lush forests and so much more. I think the most popular image of Hong Kong is that of an urban densepack, a Blade Runnerish metropolis, a Chinatown overdosing on steroids. Parts of the city are certainly like that. But most of Hong Kong is mountainous and incredibly green.
The beach at Repulse Bay.
The only problem with the Stanley Gap and Wong Chong Nai Gap climbs is that the road is extremely narrow and lacks a shoulder in most places. Double-decker buses pass each other with just a few inches between them. Cabs fly around the blind corners. Tour buses hog the roads. This is why during my two years in Hong Kong, I couldn’t work up the nerve to get my bike on the road. Everytime I was ready to do it, there would be a story in the paper about a cyclist getting flattened by a bus or truck. Many cyclists do brave the roads, and on Sunday you can see several groups climbing the Gap roads.
Mist over the South China Sea on a Sunday morning.
I usually climbed vicariously by watching the riders from a seat on the top of a double-decker bus. But if I ever leave China, one of the last things I’ll do is take my bike back to Hong Kong and climb the Gap roads.
I’ve been sitting at the keyboard debating whether I’m a bike snob. On the one hand, I think if someone enjoys riding a bike – any kind of bike – that’s great. I’m happy for them. But on the other hand, I don’t really care to be near anyone riding one of those folding bikes, which are becoming outrageously popular in China. Wait, I should clarify something. If someone is commuting on one of those things or running errands or just tooling around like David Byrne does, that’s fine. I appreciate the utility of the machines. But I’m troubled by people – mostly men in their 20s and 30s in China – who ride them for sport (like here). And I don’t like how they try to adopt our roadie attire. They should learn from the fixie crowd and develop their own style.
Recent Comments