Favourite things

One of my favourite things to do here in China is get on my bike, stick my head phones in and ride like a crazy lady around the streets. In China, everyone on the road is really slow. I mean everybody. When I ride I overtake cars. It's not that I'm some bionic uberwoman, there's just a pace that traffic moves to here that's rhythmic, like a low sub-sonic soundwave.The cars keep it, the bicycles and the busses. And everyones happy. Slow, late and happy.

There are some behaviours that are inbuilt or at least learned from a young age. Take littering. I just can not for the life of me discard so much as a gum wrapper on Beijing's filthy streets without feeling like I'm going to hell. Riding is another thing. If I am on a vehicle, it must mean I am in a rush to get somewhere that mere walking alone would not suffice and therefore must ride like I'm being chased by Satan himself. Slow is not an option. But you know what? It works!

There's a chaos theory thing that happens. Beijing is a city of millions and the streets are stuporfyingly crowded. People make their own rules and definitely don't stick to the conventional stuff like right of way and orderly queuing. I grind streets to a halt by giving right of way to grannies and the frail and infirm. The rules always seems to change, but there's a pattern. It remnds be of when Jeff Goldblum demonstrated Chaos Theory on Laura Dern's hand in Jurassic Park. Wasn't that a creepy moment? Anyway, somehow in China it all works.

I try to ride at least twice as fast as the Chinese national average, or triple it. There's a pattern when exaggerated it fits and all of a sudden, you're flying. Sifted between the merging cars and outpacing the busses, leaving the other cyclists for dead. It's all or nothing though. Riding just a bit faster than everyone is not an option. That shit'll get you killed.. You have to crank that soundwave up an entire octave or perish.