i once again own a bike
I have a great aversion to owning stuff. It makes me feel trapped. But also it feels wasteful. I try to keep my ecological footprint small. So many people have so much stuff that they hardly ever or even never use. My rule of thumb is if i am not going to actively use something at least once a week, every week, i shouldn't buy it. And if i can't transport it independently when i move, then even if i were to use it more frequently i would have to think very carefully about whether the value i got from the object while i was housed up would be worth the stress of eventually trying to move or get rid of it. For almost all things, it is not worth it.
And so i have lived, going on 10 years now. It's been the best decade of my life, not because i had the most fun or because i was in my peak physical condition, but because i had the least lows. I always felt free, or at least free enough that at any moment, at any time i could just say "fuck it" and decide to do something else, to go somewhere else. That freedom is worth more to me than any object in my house, or - indeed - even having a house at all. I will never let myself be tied down again, not like that.
Of course, there are always some constraints on your life, no matter who or where you are. Right now my constraint is immigration status, and needing to maintain a job to keep myself above the financial and employment threshold for at least one (and preferably more) of my three years as a gold card temporary worker, so that i can transition into a permanent resident. So help me God, if China decide to fuck this up after five years of toiling away in an office while i set up my retirement base, i am going to be more than a little upset. Mais c'est la vie. Right now millions of people around the world are having their lives fucked up by wars they didn't choose. It's been happening since the dawn of civilization, i suppose. What can you do? Just keep on living.
Anyway, this is kind of tangential, because i am trying to avoid the Sunday night blues and my usual post-purchase existential dread.
You guys, i bought a bike.
I won't bore y'all with the very long internal dialog i had about what kind of bike i wanted or if i even wanted to own a bike at all. Yesterday i decided to disrupt my usual analysis paralysis and just go to a fucking real-life bike shop to see the stuff first-hand, practice speaking Chinese and get out of the bubble of my apartment.
And i saw this bike, and i loved it, and i told myself i would sleep on it, but by the time the bike shop opened at noon today, i had fully sold myself on it, and rolled in with debit card in hand.
It looks a bit like a BMX, but it's a folding bike. One that folds up so small you can put it into a suitcase or even just an Ikea bag. The most well-known brand of this style of bike is a UK company called Brompton, who are famous for holding a patent on the design and then - after it expired - suing other bike companies for copyright infringement instead. This might not be such a dick move if their bikes were affordable, but they are very, very expensive. At one bike store here i asked what the price was of their cheapest model, and it was four times my monthly rent. Fortunately Chinese OEMs don't give a shit and in the past few years they've released dozens of clones. Just like they did with cellphones, the Chinese factories start with a bodgy clone, but then they iterate on it and improve and end up going in new directions that western companies are not hungry enough to experiment with.
So this is a Chinese "something like a Brompton" bicycle, except with disc brakes and 9 gears and BMX-sized wheels, and all for a quarter the price. I'm sure the build quality is lower, but it's all standard, easily-replaceable components, so if or when something does break, any bike store can fix it. When you want to use a bike for touring around rural areas and small towns, that counts for a lot. Also, when you want to take a bike on a plane where it is liable to get smashed to bits by careless luggage handlers, wouldn't you rather have a cheap and cheerful one than a priceless objet d'art? Let's not even talk about the anxiety of leaving a bit of kit worth thousands of dollars out front of a convenience store when you nip in for a drink.
But, you know, it's the honeymoon period.
To give it a decent test run, i rode straight out of the bike shop up to Bali, which is normally about a 35-40km loop, depending how i go. It was fine. The seat post slipped down a bit, so i really did feel like i was on a BMX at times, but that should be an easy fix. It's so funny how having a private bike instead of using a share bike raises your status in the eyes of the spandex wearing road bike contingent, who now gave me "the nod" as i zoomed past. "Allez, allez, allez!"
I mean, i was still just going for a weekend ride in my flip-flops, but why not? Allez! I want to say my yellow shirt made a difference, but i wore the pink one today.
Actually, riding to the bike shop out in Taipei's suburban hell (i got trapped in a gigantic outlet mall's parking lot full of cars, and it was like a nightmare where i had gone to sleep in Taiwan and woke up in America), i passed a bunch of Hey Song vending machines i normally do not pass, and guess what?
Grass jelly!
I guess it pays to go a different way from time to time.
It was a very humid day, with intermittent explosions of rain and rolling thunder threatening much worse. But it never got too bad, so i picked up a sausage on a stick from one of the "street vendors" who actually is just an old lady in a village-like corner of Bali who kicks off her backyard BBQ every Sunday and sells sausages to passersby, and then enjoyed a passion fruit icecream from another of my regular street vendors while i watched the river flow by.
Now that i have a bike of my own, it is unlocking more ideas for weekend trips that could break me out of the grind. I could chuck it in an Ikea bag and take the train to Hsinchu on Saturday, then do the overnight stretch from there through Miaoli and down through Taichung, without the inconvenience of needing to switch bike stations almost 10km apart and walk the gap, or get back to central Taichung to drop off. I could cycle from Changhua south into Yunlin and on to Chiayi - the west coast stretch where there are no share bikes. I could cycle the east coast! My work is doing a corporate get-together in Yilan next month, and i know after that i am going to need some time alone... if i took my bike down, i could just keep pedaling south through Hualien to Taitung! I could go visit Okinawa! Fuck cars! Let's go!
All of this is leading to the eventual trip to Aotearoa to see dad over Chinese New Year. If this bike seems solid on my trial runs, then maybe i will book a longer vacation down there, safe in the knowledge i can get out and zoom around on my own for a bit. And if it doesn't... well the litigious Brits will have the last laugh.
I was thinking, i paid about a month's rent for this "weekends only" vehicle. And i have now lived in Taiwan for 2 years. If i add up all the money i spent riding YouBike in those 2 years, it almost equals the price of the bike. So if i get 2 years of weekend rides out of it, then i got my money's worth. If i get 21 days of contiguous travel, that's already a fifth of the cost recouped. Plus if i rented a bike for 21 days in New Zealand, even a cheap rental would be half the cost... So it feels like it's not a waste of money, just as long as it doesn't fall to pieces the first time i try to climb a hill. If it does i'll take the plane to Hong Kong, ride over the Lo Wu checkpoint, through Shenzhen City, up to Dongguan Hengli district and knock on the door of the factory to give them a piece of my mind. I know where you live, damnit! I used to live there too, or near enough!
Or, you know, probably not, but it's nice to imagine new adventures. It feels like i'm discovering hidden treasure in a thing that i only bought for its utility. Why do people buy junk to fill the holes in their heart? Even it's stuff they don't use much, having it might spark the imagination somehow, and that's worth something on its own, especially in a world so full of awful shit going on. We don't have long. Allez!
And so i have lived, going on 10 years now. It's been the best decade of my life, not because i had the most fun or because i was in my peak physical condition, but because i had the least lows. I always felt free, or at least free enough that at any moment, at any time i could just say "fuck it" and decide to do something else, to go somewhere else. That freedom is worth more to me than any object in my house, or - indeed - even having a house at all. I will never let myself be tied down again, not like that.
Of course, there are always some constraints on your life, no matter who or where you are. Right now my constraint is immigration status, and needing to maintain a job to keep myself above the financial and employment threshold for at least one (and preferably more) of my three years as a gold card temporary worker, so that i can transition into a permanent resident. So help me God, if China decide to fuck this up after five years of toiling away in an office while i set up my retirement base, i am going to be more than a little upset. Mais c'est la vie. Right now millions of people around the world are having their lives fucked up by wars they didn't choose. It's been happening since the dawn of civilization, i suppose. What can you do? Just keep on living.
Anyway, this is kind of tangential, because i am trying to avoid the Sunday night blues and my usual post-purchase existential dread.
You guys, i bought a bike.
I won't bore y'all with the very long internal dialog i had about what kind of bike i wanted or if i even wanted to own a bike at all. Yesterday i decided to disrupt my usual analysis paralysis and just go to a fucking real-life bike shop to see the stuff first-hand, practice speaking Chinese and get out of the bubble of my apartment.
And i saw this bike, and i loved it, and i told myself i would sleep on it, but by the time the bike shop opened at noon today, i had fully sold myself on it, and rolled in with debit card in hand.
It looks a bit like a BMX, but it's a folding bike. One that folds up so small you can put it into a suitcase or even just an Ikea bag. The most well-known brand of this style of bike is a UK company called Brompton, who are famous for holding a patent on the design and then - after it expired - suing other bike companies for copyright infringement instead. This might not be such a dick move if their bikes were affordable, but they are very, very expensive. At one bike store here i asked what the price was of their cheapest model, and it was four times my monthly rent. Fortunately Chinese OEMs don't give a shit and in the past few years they've released dozens of clones. Just like they did with cellphones, the Chinese factories start with a bodgy clone, but then they iterate on it and improve and end up going in new directions that western companies are not hungry enough to experiment with.
So this is a Chinese "something like a Brompton" bicycle, except with disc brakes and 9 gears and BMX-sized wheels, and all for a quarter the price. I'm sure the build quality is lower, but it's all standard, easily-replaceable components, so if or when something does break, any bike store can fix it. When you want to use a bike for touring around rural areas and small towns, that counts for a lot. Also, when you want to take a bike on a plane where it is liable to get smashed to bits by careless luggage handlers, wouldn't you rather have a cheap and cheerful one than a priceless objet d'art? Let's not even talk about the anxiety of leaving a bit of kit worth thousands of dollars out front of a convenience store when you nip in for a drink.
But, you know, it's the honeymoon period.
To give it a decent test run, i rode straight out of the bike shop up to Bali, which is normally about a 35-40km loop, depending how i go. It was fine. The seat post slipped down a bit, so i really did feel like i was on a BMX at times, but that should be an easy fix. It's so funny how having a private bike instead of using a share bike raises your status in the eyes of the spandex wearing road bike contingent, who now gave me "the nod" as i zoomed past. "Allez, allez, allez!"
I mean, i was still just going for a weekend ride in my flip-flops, but why not? Allez! I want to say my yellow shirt made a difference, but i wore the pink one today.
Actually, riding to the bike shop out in Taipei's suburban hell (i got trapped in a gigantic outlet mall's parking lot full of cars, and it was like a nightmare where i had gone to sleep in Taiwan and woke up in America), i passed a bunch of Hey Song vending machines i normally do not pass, and guess what?
Grass jelly!
I guess it pays to go a different way from time to time.
It was a very humid day, with intermittent explosions of rain and rolling thunder threatening much worse. But it never got too bad, so i picked up a sausage on a stick from one of the "street vendors" who actually is just an old lady in a village-like corner of Bali who kicks off her backyard BBQ every Sunday and sells sausages to passersby, and then enjoyed a passion fruit icecream from another of my regular street vendors while i watched the river flow by.
Now that i have a bike of my own, it is unlocking more ideas for weekend trips that could break me out of the grind. I could chuck it in an Ikea bag and take the train to Hsinchu on Saturday, then do the overnight stretch from there through Miaoli and down through Taichung, without the inconvenience of needing to switch bike stations almost 10km apart and walk the gap, or get back to central Taichung to drop off. I could cycle from Changhua south into Yunlin and on to Chiayi - the west coast stretch where there are no share bikes. I could cycle the east coast! My work is doing a corporate get-together in Yilan next month, and i know after that i am going to need some time alone... if i took my bike down, i could just keep pedaling south through Hualien to Taitung! I could go visit Okinawa! Fuck cars! Let's go!
All of this is leading to the eventual trip to Aotearoa to see dad over Chinese New Year. If this bike seems solid on my trial runs, then maybe i will book a longer vacation down there, safe in the knowledge i can get out and zoom around on my own for a bit. And if it doesn't... well the litigious Brits will have the last laugh.
I was thinking, i paid about a month's rent for this "weekends only" vehicle. And i have now lived in Taiwan for 2 years. If i add up all the money i spent riding YouBike in those 2 years, it almost equals the price of the bike. So if i get 2 years of weekend rides out of it, then i got my money's worth. If i get 21 days of contiguous travel, that's already a fifth of the cost recouped. Plus if i rented a bike for 21 days in New Zealand, even a cheap rental would be half the cost... So it feels like it's not a waste of money, just as long as it doesn't fall to pieces the first time i try to climb a hill. If it does i'll take the plane to Hong Kong, ride over the Lo Wu checkpoint, through Shenzhen City, up to Dongguan Hengli district and knock on the door of the factory to give them a piece of my mind. I know where you live, damnit! I used to live there too, or near enough!
Or, you know, probably not, but it's nice to imagine new adventures. It feels like i'm discovering hidden treasure in a thing that i only bought for its utility. Why do people buy junk to fill the holes in their heart? Even it's stuff they don't use much, having it might spark the imagination somehow, and that's worth something on its own, especially in a world so full of awful shit going on. We don't have long. Allez!