< >单车旅行故事外来务工人员版</P>< >人物：我和一个外国朋友</P>< >坐骑：永久28，经常掉链条的力霸黄</P><P>时间：前年大年初六开始后的一周</P> <P>1。</P> <P> <TABLE cellSpacing=8 cellPadding=0 width="100%" align=center border=0 nowrap> <TR> <TD> <DIV><PRE>well, day 3 of a crazy bike trip with my friend zhang yong. we made it to our first destination, xinchang, where a friend of mine lives. it tooks us 2 days to get here. the first day, it took us 3 hours just to get out of hangzhou! we biked 59 km the first day and my bike chain fell off 10 times. i'm biking on a crappy one speed bike which is a piece of shit, but has made it so far okay. the second day we took a break in shaoxing, a beautiful town famous for it's wine (which i'm going to bring back to you when i come home), and canals that run through the town. it's also famous for the best stinky tofu in china. i may not have told you about stinky tofu before. it is a street snack very popular around china-basically fried cubes of tofu on a stick. the name stinky tofu is a literal translation and that is just what it is. it smells like a farm and the first (and i thought the last) time i tried it, i felt as if it was the closest i would ever get to eating manure. but that was my first week in china and so i thought i would try one more time. zhang yong's friend took us to the best stinky tofu in shaoxing, a small stall on a side street. it did not look like what you might expect from the best stinky tofu in china, but the woman who runs the stand is widely known as the best, so i lined up to try it. i held my stick in my hand, a little wary to inflict such an unpleasant experience on myself again, and then popped a cube in my mouth....I LIKED IT! what a surprise! it was really good. later i realized, i have a cold and my sense of smell must have been severely impaired because i didn't mind it at all! yesterday we took off from shaoxing to xinchang and rode 96 km (about 57 miles). it was more difficult than the first day because of hills wind and my stupid chain which fell off 14 more times. now i can fix a chain with my eyes closed! we biked 9 hours and the last hour we biked along with a great fireworks show because yesterday was the last day of the national holiday for spring festival. we made it to my friend's home, took showers and i slept very well...until 7:30 am when the fireworks started up again (not the earliest i have heard fireworks either!). today we've been eating, eating, and visiting places around xinchang with my friend, his wife who is 6 months pregnant and a bunch of their friends. tomorrow we're going to try and bike another 55 km to tianching, it's going to get more hilly i think. i'm not sure how long we'll bike. zhang yong wants to bike all the way to wenzhou (305 km), but i'm not sure i have the time to or can make it. i'm surprised that i've made it this far and that i'm not more tired or sore. while we're riding my legs and ass are sore, but after a night's sleep i generally feel fine. even my bad knee is holding up somewhat. </PRE></DIV></TD></TR></TABLE></P> < >2。</P><>well, hard to believe, but zhang yong and i are onlyabout 50 km away from wenzhou. that means we'll get there tomorrow. two days ago we left my friend's home in xinchang and biked 105 km in one day, through mountains and by rivers. it was a really nice day, although the first two hours were all uphill. zhang yong had told me before...hey we can do it, with every uphill there's a downhill. but i wasn't seeing any downhills. finally, they arrived and after that it was easy. long long downhills winding around hills where i could shout out songs from 7 brides for 7 brothers with no one to laugh at me. unfortunately, zhang yong got a flat tire and so had to walk 5 km. this is where cell phones really come in handy. i was ahead of him, so he sent me a message to let me know he was delayed and i sent him a message when i saw a bike repair man. there are so many streetside bike repair shops in china that it's not really necessary to know how to do repairs yourself-however, i wish we had brought some tools for my bike chain and zhang yong's tire. we made it to tiantai and then decided to bike another 50 km to linhai. it was a really beautiful and nice ride until a very scary long tunnel (2 to 3 km long) that freaked me out. i now have decided i have a phobia of tunnels where i can't see in front of me. the light at the end of the tunnel is a metaphor i truly understand now. afterwards, i was a little wiped out and accidentally biked into a stack of straw which i didn't notice on the side of the road! i was so exhausted by the end of the day i went straight to sleep. yesterday we biked half a day to taizhou, about 50 km away. it was an easy ride and we passed farms and goats and by the time we got to taizhou my chain had come off for the 50th time. zhang yong is an english teacher and has students in taizhou who took really good care of us. one insisted on paying for hotel rooms and dinner and even showed up this morning with oranges for the road. it was a little overboard but when i tried to pay for dinner, we almost got into a physical altercation(not uncommon at all between people fighting over a bill in china) so i left it at that. this morning another of his students' took us for breakfast and then we were on our way. it was much colder today, the past few days have been 15-18 degrees celcius but today was 5. after my chain fell off the 56th time, i decided to go to another bike mechanic and this time it got fixed for good. i'm hoping that it won't fall off again! after biking for a few hours through large towns decorated with lanterns for the lantern festival which is in a few days, we walked up a long long hill, maybe 6 km., the natural border between taizhou county and wenzhou county. somewhere on that hill i lost a sock i'd been using as a mitten, just another thing i've lost in china (the most interesting being 5 missing pairs of underwear). at the top we passed by square mountain, which is a mountain that is square. and then the downhill i'd been waiting for, but unfortunately zhang yong got another flat. so i biked to the next town, maybe 6 km away and waited and waited and waited for him to show up. i may have been the first white person in that town as everyone who passed me remarked 'laowei' (foreigner) and stared at me longer than i'm used to. one boy stood staring at me for a while and then followed me to stare at me more. then he walked to the other side of me so he could see that side too! while in town, zhang yong got his bike fixed and we had lunch (he cooked a meal for the owner of the restaurant so that she would have time to cook his meal) and watched a wedding party pass by (bride in red wedding dress with roses, lots of firecrackers)- in all today we saw 7 weddings go by! we passed lots of people biking and pulling wheelbarrows filled with metal poles, trees, and other people! we made it to yueqing by 7, crossing over the gulf of yueqing and accompanied by lots of fireworks shows to watch on the way, but w < >3。</P><>i've got to say, biking on chinese roads is a littlecrazy. it's basically biking on the highway, with a wide shoulder. sometimes we have our own lane. the tunnel that i wrote about was one of the scariest experiences in my life though. it was completely dark. i couldn't see anything unless a car came zooming by and i lost my depth perception so was wobbling around. zhang yong wasn't scared at all, so i don't think he really understood how incredibly scary it was for me. the roads are pretty flat though, so it is not so hard to bike on them. i don't really feel that worn out after biking over 90 km. today. i wish that i could say that biking over 400 km has helped me get in shape, but i don't think it has done a thing. i guess i'll just have to lay off all the fried food once i'm back in hangzhou. i'm going to bike to school every day i think (1 hour each way) so maybe that will help a little. kevin and zhang yong and i all want to bike a lot this term (starts next week) so there will be more adventures to be had. </P> < >4。</P><>well, we made it to wenzhou. it wasn't bad at allriding today, although it was really cold. but today i was much more tired and lagged a bit behind zhang yong.as we approached the city it decided to hail, just for a little bit of an extra challenge! we arrived in wenzhou around 12 and biked to the wharf to take a ferry across the water to downtown wenzhou. after yesterday's ride, i was glad to be done. i still can't really believe that we made it all this way and my body isn't more sore. it's been so much fun riding with zhang yong- both of us had never done this before and i didn't really believe we could do it, so it was an adventure for both of us. i'm looking forward to more bike adventures this term.</P> < >这个是老外写的，刚刚翻出来，很怀念当时的激情...</P> |
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