Beijing, China. April 2013.
| This is a season of bicycles. Partly it’s about the weather, and partly it’s about vacations and people having time to ride. A friend has been posting photographs from his mountain biking trip in Switzerland, with trails only a few inches wide in valleys of mountains that go on and on. The Tour de France is riding through the mountains, and apparently, for the first time, there will be a Tour de Banff in the Canadian Rockies. Yesterday families of cyclists rolled along the riverside. The five-year olds push pedal-less bikes to learn the balance of two-wheeled bliss.
Much has been made of the bicycles in Beijing. Nine million of them, the songs say. Bicycles that do not wait for seasons or free time or sunny weather. Bicycles of utility. Bicycles of necessity. Bicycles of shortening the shortest distance between points A and B. I wonder if there’s a song about the number of cars in Beijing. I expect they are equally numerous, though not nearly as romantic. |
The Puddlewonder Press 
I’m more worried about being run over by a bicyclist than a car sometimes!
You make a good point, Verónica. Many of the cyclists were quite single-minded, and the rules about cycling always seem less transparent than the rules about other kinds of traffic in most cities. Being run over by cyclists is worth worrying about.