campus bulletin boards illuminated at night

Smog and haze are the norm for Beijing in the summer so it's a real treat to see clear blue skies with white wisps of cloud. Unbelievably, today was the second beautiful day in a row. And what better way to spend a sunny day than riding a bicycle?

Up until today, I've relied on my poor two feet to cover all this distance in Beijing. Crazy pedestrian and vehicle traffic aside (which is a big aside), Beijing is a great city for biking. It's flat as a chessboard, with bike lanes most of the time, and so I took up Mat's kind offer to take us some bike shops in the neighbourhood. He is from Sweden and knows Beijing well as he going into the 3rd year of the 4-year undergraduate chinese language program. Puja and Martin (also Swedish and in need of a bike) came along too and in about 2 hours, Martin and I both had bike locks and bicycles to use them with. I bought a used bike for 90 RMB or a financially crippling 10.80 USD. It's a bit old and tends a bit to the left but it's not a bad ride. It's actually a bad idea to get a shiny new bike for general use in Beijing because bicycle theft is so rampant. Anti-theft strategies here consist of:

1) buy a crap bike
2) lock said bike
3) park said bike next to one that looks nicer than yours and/or less secure than yours

People also lock their bikes differently than in the US. There isn't necessarily enough places to lock your bike to because of the sheer number of bikes in Beijing. If people can't secure the bike to another object, they just thread the bike lock around the wheel and the frame, preventing the wheel from rotating if someone tried to ride it. Helmets also aren't used; I'm not sure you can even buy one if you wanted one. Another Beijing bicycling quirk is a cyclist travelling with a passenger perched behind sitting sideways on the luggage rack - a graceful balancing act that Craig and I are going to attempt once he gets a bike.

After returning to the school pick up Puja's and Mat's bikes, we went for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Tsinghua University. Puja and I walked around Tsinghua two days ago but because the Tsinghua campus is very very large, being on a bicycle makes a huge difference. Getting there was twice as fast and we saw more of the campus without becoming as exhausted as last time. One of my favourite things about the University - and Beijing as a whole - are the many parks dotted here and there. Tsinghua has several beautiful parks on campus, with flowers, trees, winding walkways, and even ponds, which are great for aimless wandering and a super way to escape the city hustle and bustle.

Leaving Tsinghua and going back to campus was the scary part. The roads to Tsinghua from the restuarant where we ate lunch weren't bad, but from Tsinghua to BLCU, we have to travel along a very busy road, 成府路 Cheng Fu Lu. There's a bike lane but cars frequently cut into it, buses enter the lane at bus stops, and taxis pull in and out to pickup and dropoff passengers. Crossing a road is even more chaotic since cars can turn against a red light so one frequently has to manoever around cars, other bikes, and pedestrians, often crossing the boundary between the bike lane and road in the process.

About a block away from BLCU, I came up behind a parked taxi in the bike lane. As I was half-way through passing the taxi, the driver either didn't check his mirrors or his blind spot because he suddenly began pulling out into traffic. At the same time, a bus started blaring it's horn (which in Beijing means "I'm coming up behind you and I'm not slowing down so get the hell out of my way") but because the taxi was in my way, I couldn't veer away from traffic back into the lane. Long story short, I was about to get sandwiched between a taxi on my right and bus on my left and would have been sideswiped by one or the other if the cabbie didn't suddenly realize I was there and braked hard, leaving barely enough room in front of his car for me to pass through back into the bike lane just as the bus sped by my left. It was very frightening and I'm just glad I didn't panic and tumble off my bike at the time.