(written by Cait, with input from Brad)
It’s just like riding a bike, once you learn, you never forget…well, turns out you can forget. I’ll get to that in a moment. Brad and I decided to open an invitation to the students at our centers to go bike riding at Da Fu Mountain (I made an earlier post about this mountain/park, A Real Chinese Treat).
So, we journeyed to the southern district of the city, Panyu, by subway, then by bus, then by bike.
Check out the pictures:
Honestly, I am quite amazed at how many people know how to ride bikes here. Yes, I know that sounds very arrogant and stupid, bla bla bla, but if you lived here, you would know what I mean. The only people I see riding bikes here are doing it for work-making deliveries or transporting products. I have yet to see someone casually riding a bike for enjoyment. First of all, there’s really no good place to learn how to ride a bike, and storage in apartments is limited. Maybe everyone learns at places like DaFu-I don’t know. Although I can say they know how to ride a bike, but many act like complete morons once they get on… swerving on the path, barreling down a hill and around corners with no sense of on-coming bikers, etc. Fortunately, we had no such bikers in our group.
Unfortunately, we had a weak biker in our group. If you’ve ever seen the tv show, Friends, there is an episode where Phoebe claims that she can ride a bike, and to hide her lie, she just walks the bike around…well, we had a situation similar to that. One student had a pretty tough time making it a couple feet before she jumped/stumbled off the bike. Leading the pack, I didn’t notice this problem until she was about 200 yards behind us-and we hadn’t even made it into the park yet. My heart sank. What were we going to do? She clearly wouldn’t be able to keep up with us, but I didn’t want to be the one to tell her we can’t wait for her all day. In her defense, she did tell Brad that she hadn’t rode a bike in a while, but he brushed it off and thought, once she gets going, she’ll be fine. After all, once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget…WRONG.
But, we came up with a quick solution and another student offered to switch bikes and ride tandem with her. Viola! Problem solved! From then on, the trip was fun and worry-free.