Bikes

Now here's a recipe for a completely Chinese experience: take one bicycle and just enough courage to face the outside world in the streets of China and just wait to see what happens.

My first bike that I had here in Kunming was a heavy number, pretending to be a mountain bike but probably suited just for rolling down the slopes than ever attempting to go up. Anyway, it served me relatively well and took me to where I wanted to go, until one day it just went "crack" and the whole correded body just snapped in two.

But no worries, I headed for the second (third...seventh...??) -hand market to get a new one. This is a place where the stolen bikes end up, which means that there is a constantly changing selection of everything from rusty skeletons to shiny new racing bikes.

I decided to take my chances on a mountain bike bearing the proud name of ZENDA. The price was ridiculously low (8 euros) and it seemed to be in decent condition. After all, the previous summer in Jinan I got a fairly good bike for just 6,5 euros so I was willing to risk it again. The keyword here, of course, is 'seemed'.

From then on, I have gotten to know most of the bike repair men (occupying many street corners in the city) near the university, replacing various parts and just generally trying to keep Zenda in one piece.

Until a couple of days ago, when it finally came to a point where it would have been pointlessly expensive to get it fixed, the whole back wheel should have been changed. So, as I was standing there with the corpse of Zenda and the bike repair guy, he pointed out his own bike to me, saying that even his was better than mine. So, in a Chinese way I asked him how much would he sell it for. After some negotiations, we agreed that I'd get it for 50 yuan (5 euro), and he'd put my old lock and seat on it as well as give me free repairs from now on.

Not a great bike by no means, another piece of equipment that could easily qualify as something to be used in the wolrld weightlifting championships, but it moves, it moves...

So, I took my new bike and headed for lunch in a cafe up along the same street. Two hours later, coming out from the cafe and trying to open the lock, I realised that I couldn't fit the key in the lock. Reason for this being, as I quickly found out, was that there was a bit of a broken screwdriver inside the lock. So, as I'd been inside, someone had already tried to steal my new ride. With no success, thankfully. So, back to the bike guy, who forced the lock off...

Yesterday, a friend of mine had his bike stolen from that very same spot. His second one in two days. A bike whose pedals kept falling of despite its being new. And after having had two other new bikes practically fall apart as he was riding them.

Ooooo the joys of China biking :)

The Melting Pot

It's funny how my life here in China has changed since last year. When I was living up in Baoding, I was going through a series of Chinese experiences, sometimes like little explosions of cultural learning. From time to time, little things in my life kept reminding me that I truly was in China.

And now, here in Kunming, my life just *is*. Often it feels like it doesn't belong to any particular place at all.

The thing about Kunming that makes life here different from Baoding, is the cultural variety that we get. Being near the border, there is much more of foreign influence from nearby countries. And the Western presence here is on a completely different scale here. You can see white faces anywhere, in the traffic, in the markets, in the webcafes (I can see quite a few around me right now!)... And you can have your pizza (and not chinese style!) and cappuccino in the Western cafes near our university, or go and listen to a Danish jazzband in an artgallery near where I live. But at the same time, you can go to the market just around the cornet from the gallery and you'll definitely feel like being in China, with all the noise and smells and pushing and arguing over the prices ;)

So, it's a wonderful mixture of a lot of different things and cultures. It's what makes life here easy and much less challenging than being in a 100% Chinese environment.

But it also results in me going through my days like floating down the river, not making a lot of cultural observations or being hit by those little explosions.

...which in turn results in my blog slowing down and becoming incresingly uninteresting....ehhhh ;-P