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Published: September 5th 2010
Red Bike Rentals
All around HangzhouToday is our Blog's one year anniversary!!! We were convinced by our great friends, Staci & Martin, to start a blog about our adventures in China. Since Facebook was blocked it was actually a great way to share our experiences and pictures of our daily lives in China and all our upcoming travels(I don't think we had any clue as to how much time we would really have off of work last year). This year it will be fun to look back at last year's posts to remember what we were doing one year ago.
There have been several differences that I've noticed between the two cities that deserve mentioning. The first is that when crossing the street here in Hangzhou the drivers first reaction is not to speed up and honk at you. Its often the public buses that are the first to stop at cross walks for pedestrians. This is quit the opposite from Shenzhen where the bus drivers were amongst the worst offenders. Regularly running red lights, speeding, pushing on the horn more frequently than the gas peddle, entering on coming traffic; not just to pass a slower vehicle, but to simply drive on the wrong side
Myself with my rain gear on
No it isn't raining today but just for the photo of the road, and of course hitting everything that doesn't get the hell out of the way. I saw one biker get knocked off his bike by a bus driver, several curbs run over, and a dozen or so cars smashed by the public buses. Its the law of I'm bigger so get out of my way.
The second is that there are visibly blue sky days here in Hangzhou. Living in Longgang there were a few days of blue skies, but generally after a few days of really hard rain. Otherwise it was a tint of yellowish haze looming over the entire city. Towards the end of last year I remember being in the downtown area of Shenzhen and seeing the mountains of the Hong Kong New Territories in the distance and thinking that those must be new since I've never seen them before(but probably not).
Lastly, our school absolutely kicks butt. I believe that they have done more for us in the first week of our arrival than our old school did for us the entire year. We even got a custom metal cabinet made for our kitchen. In Longgang the school sent a school worker
whom often inflected more damage to our apartment than before his arrival to remedy the problem. We could get used to having a school that actually cares how we are doing. This reminds me of one of our old teachers that on more than one occasion told us that the school really didn't care for us, or any of the foreign teachers they ever get. This statement was the truth which is hard to find in the Chinese culture.
Some great things about Hangzhou is that it is a very biker friendly city. There are public bikes that you can rent at almost every other block downtown. Even in the outskirts of town there are several about a mile or so spread out for people to rent bikes. We ventured on to take a little bike ride on one of these the other day. We simply scanned the bike out with our bus pass which releases the locking mechanism, and then scan it back in to any other bike corral when we are done. If its been less than one hour then its free. There are also built in locks to lock the bikes for when you want to
get off and there is no bike corral near by. Its totally awesome.
Today we bought our Electric Bikes for about 2,000 kuai each. We will no longer need to rely on taking a cab or bus into town. They travel at a whopping 40 km per hour and need to be recharged every 60 km or so. This will be ideal since it costs around 50 - 60 kuai round trip in a cab from our location to the downtown area of Hangzhou. It took only 20 minutes by bike to get into the downtown area today. It will be our goal to go to town at least twice a week while we are here and the bikes will pay for themselves. We think that we will do a lot of hiking and walking around Hangzhou since there are plenty of trails and nice vistas throughout the city. Thus far its been really enjoyable and we look forward to seeing more of what Hangzhou and the surrounding cities have to offer.
Elyse is excited to start teaching on Tuesday as we haven't had this much time to sit around and enjoy ourselves since teaching in Shenzhen. But
even then the last couple months we were always busy traveling somewhere.
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Mom
non-member comment
1st Anniv
Glad to hear that you are enjoying your new city...would you please convert the cost of the bikes into dollars???