Charlie

The good thing about living in China is, if by February you have already failed at all of your New Year’s Resolutions, you get a second excuse to promise things to yourself for Chinese New Year. So here’s to restarting my blog in the brand new year of the snake!

I have no idea how to summarize or organize my experiences in China. I considered focusing my blog around my bike: Charlie. It would be called “Adventures with Charlie” and would describe what I see and feel on our trips together. But that seems a bit narrow. Charlie has, however, radically transformed my life in Ningbo. I didn't have a bike for an entire WEEK when I first arrived; buying those two wheels of freedom was the best decision I have made thus far. Here he is at the bike shop where we first met:

 I really enjoy exploring Ningbo by bike.  It’s a city of 3 million (8 million if you include the administrative districts), but it’s very flat and I can get most places in about 20 minutes.  I have tested the efficiency of biking against taxis and on busy Friday nights the bike wins every time.  I admit that biking in a Chinese city is a slightly hazardous endeavor.  But really it just comes down to needing to watch out for a few things – namely, cars, scooters, other bikes,  pedestrians, parked cars, portable food stands that can pull out in front of you with vats of boiling noodles or steaming sweet potatoes, etc.  There are bike lanes on most roads.  These double as the bus lane, but fortunately, all buses are equipped with a distinctive squealing brake to warn bikes approaching bus stops that they are about to get smashed. 

Anyway, Charlie and I have had several notable adventures together.  On our first day trip out of Ningbo we visited the Asoka temple – about 1.5 hours away.  It was a little difficult to find because a large portion of the route I had planned to take was under construction.  Construction is a constant reality in China.  Roads, buildings, new metro lines, flyover tracks for high speed trains: it’s everywhere.  To find a new route, I pulled out my Ningbo map (my 2^nd best purchase in China, after Charlie, of course) and people immediately came to my aid.  I find this to be true again and again – when I am in need I always meet kind people. 

Charlie and I made it to the temple.  I lit incense and wandered from shrine to shrine (Charlie waited patiently outside).  At the last shrine a man in a robe offered me a cup of tea.  I sat and we communicated as people who don’t share the same language often do.  Laughter, gestures, guesses, shrugs.  Then he asked if he could kiss me.  I said no and he didn’t seem to mind.  

The tea man

Charlie and I have also been lucky enough to find other biking enthusiasts in Ningbo.  One of my co-workers, Kimi, took me to Dongqian lake.  Kimi is a serious biker and much too fast for me, but he always offers encouragement.  For example, after an especially steep climb he reassured me that, “Your health is actually okay.”  I especially like the tea plantations and villages around Dongqian and hope to go back (more slowly) and take pictures.  

Kimi

Me at Dongqian lake

On another ride to another lake (Jiulonghu) with another friend, (Wojtek ) I encountered yet another hazard of biking in China.  With all of the construction, roads are a minefield of flat-causing material.  Wojtek and I had taken main roads to the lake because neither of us had been there before.  But on the way back we decided to be a little more adventurous and just take roads that led generally in the right direction.  It was going well until after passing through a lovely village, I got an instant flat.  Wojtek didn’t have his patch kit and we couldn’t get on a bus with our bikes so the only option was to walk them back to the village and hope that someone there could help us.  I showed the flat tire to people we passed and they kept pointing us in the same direction.  The end of our search was a tarpaulin canopy over three small chairs with three old men.  It was, in fact, a flat-fixing business.  The oldest man took my bike and confidently flipped it over.  He unlatched the brake, slipped the tube out with his knife and began testing for the flat in a bucket of water.  When he found the flat, he sanded the tube so that the patch would stick, applied the patch, reinserted the tube, and pumped up the tire with a homemade air compressor that looked like a tea kettle.  The whole process took about 5 minutes and cost 3 yuan – approximately 50 cents.  The process was so beautiful that Wojtek and I sat under the canopy and stayed to watched him fix the next flat.   

As much as I enjoy Charlie’s company, I know that realistically he is a temporary fixture in my life.  As with all bikes in China, the probability that Charlie will disappear at some point is high.  This was brought home to me one day at my apartment.  I keep Charlie in a locked basement storage room which everyone who rents in my apartment building has a key to.  I usually keep a lock around the back tire, but for some reason on this particular day I had just left the lock strapped to the bike frame.  It was my day off and I was excited to go for a ride in the sunshine.  Imagine my shock when I opened the basement door and saw that Charlie was gone!  I went directly to the apartment security guard and explained in my childish Chinese that my bike “is not”/没有/mei you.  He got the drift and sent another guard with me to investigate.  I showed him the absence of bike in the basement.  Then he asked, “Is your bike black?”  “Yes!  Yes, it is!”  “Come with me.”  He took me to a guard house on the other side of the community, led me inside, and there was Charlie – with someone else’s lock already on the back tire!  I proved that he was mine by producing the key to the lock on the frame.  They had a friend cut off the new lock and Charlie was restored.  I have no idea who took him or why he was in the guard house, but I am happy to have made friends with the guards and to have Charlie back. So, I enjoy him for now, I feel happy whenever I find him where I last put him, and I am reminded to hold possessions more loosely.