Riding on Mopeds with Strange Chinese Men: A Tutorial

If you ever find yourself in a situation that requires you to climb on the back of a moped with a Chinese man you met less than 30 seconds ago, the following are some tips and tricks to help you get through the experience with all your limbs.

1. Keep your knees tucked in as much as possible. There are many obstacles in the streets of Beijing that your driver will need to maneuver around. These include bicycles, cars, pedestrians, various lane barriers, public buses, and more. All of which may or may not be going in the same direction as you are down the one-way bike lane. Although you may think that you are doing your driver a favor by keeping your straddle as wide as possible so as to avoid crushing him in a terrified knee-vice, better that than cracking your kneecaps on random traffic cones. Trust me, even if you think you have strong kneecaps and what could a traffic cone do to you anyway? Keep your knees in. Also, keep your feet on the footrests. Do not try to hold your feet off the ground without support. That is some next level shit and should not be attempted by novices who expect to still have feet at the end of their journey. 

2. Hold on to something. If you feel familiar enough with your driver, you can hold on to him. You can also hold on to the moped itself. This is important because when you inevitably drive down a crowded pedestrian walkway, your driver will be forced to do a lot of stopping and starting, which may cause you to pitch back and forth quite violently.

3. Practice your apologetic face. This is especially important if you find yourself on a street that is technically for pedestrians only, with a driver who believes that it is necessary to honk and scream at people for daring to walk down the pedestrian walkway.

4. Prepare for the stares. You are a foreigner in China. most of the things you do in public will draw stares. Riding on a moped with a Chinese guy is definitely on the list of things that will draw the most stares.

5. Trust the random Chinese man. Your driver has been driving a moped for at least a day, probably much much longer. So far, he hasn't died, so he probably knows what he's doing. Even though he may weave around buses and occasionally veer into traffic or zip within an inch of an unsuspecting pedestrian, you are probably in safe hands.

-A

Beijing Pedway

Engineer:     "This subway system will be awesome!"
Supervisor:  "Yes, but it needs more stops"
Engineer:     "There's no money to build extra stops"
Supervisor:  "Why don't we give each stop, like, 6 exits?"
Engineer:     "Oh, and we'll put each exit like 500 meters from the actual train platform?"
Supervisor:  "Yeah, that way, more people will be near a subway entrance"
Engineer:     "Won't people have to spend lots of time walking underground?"
Supervisor   "Yes!"
Engineer:     "Also, subway transfers will require even more walking!"
Supervisor   "Yes!"
Engineer:     "OK great.  We'll build it!"

Beijing's subway system is awesome.  It is extensive, cheap, and quiet.  The trains come very frequently.  It bears almost no resemblance to Chicago's El.

On certain trips, though, you might find yourself walking for 20 minutes and climbing 6 flights of stairs.  This is because making a transfer, or finding your exit (to return to the surface of the earth), can require a ridiculous amount of walking.

For a long time, I felt like I was being lied to.  "This is not an entrance to the subway," I thought, "This is just an entrance to an underground tunnel, far away from the subway!"

But then I realized that the walk-underground thing is actually a pretty cool idea.

It's almost like the subway is actually a subway-pedway hybrid.  The extensive underground pedestrian tunnels let you travel to the train platform while being protected from the elements.  On a hot, sunny day like today, that means a lot.

Why don't we do this in the USA?

I have observed some novel natural-resource-conserving behaviors in Beijing.  I often find myself asking, "why don't we do this in the USA?"

These behaviors are probably motivated by economic factors, rather than by some effort to "conserve".  Then again, this is a dubious distinction when conserving-money has such a complicated relationship with conserving-environment.

Anyway, here we go:

The office water cooler doesn't actually cool any water!

I don't know how much electricity a typical water cooler uses, but it's more than zero.  There's nothing wrong with drinking water that isn't cold; I think I actually prefer it.

N.B: You can't drink the tap water here, so people go through a lot of plastic bottles; this guy lets you drink without putting plastic immediately in the trash.

People give their newspapers back to a vendor when exiting the train!

This is a bit like leaving your copy of the Red Eye on the seat next to you.  Except, well, it's better.

People ride electric bicycles!

If I asked you "How to I get across the city, to a place far from the train, without arriving drenched in sweat or showing up late?", you'd probably be like "buy a car!".  The thing is, cars are stupid.  Electric bikes also solve this problem.  They don't let you travel 300 miles or carry hundreds of pounds of cargo, but whatevskis.

Lots of cargo moves by bicycle!

Well, the cargo bikes here usually have 3 wheels ("tricycle").  If I wanted to move a giant wok across Chicago, I'd probably wind up renting a car.  This makes more sense.

People eat reasonable portions of meat!

Lots of dishes here involve incidental use of meat.  The other day, I ate a noodle dish, which was composed of vegetarian ingredients sitting in a beef broth.  Rad.  The next day, I had a tofu-based dish, which came with a garnish of smoky-pork-floss-stuff.

Both of these dishes were super tasty; they made the meat ingredients go a long way.  I think that if I were to plot deliciousness versus meat-content, the curve would be logarithmic.

Wait, nevermind.  Fried chicken is a pretty good counerexample.

People don't use dryers!

Just hang that shit up!  Obviously, this can be a problem when you are in a hurry.  The other day, my co-worker put a pair of damp socks in the toaster oven.  This could have been avoided if he owned a dryer.  Edge case.

Places are sensibly air conditioned!

I haven't encountered a place where the excessive air conditioning has made me uncomfortable.  I suspect they don't exist.  Get it together, America.

An observation

As you may know, Google doesn't work here without a VPN.  Bing, however, works fine.

In Chinese, "bing" basically is a generic word for "bread-product".  So I think it's hilarious to be asking all my internet-questions at bing.com.

More tomorrow.

I had forgotten about this feeling. The feeling of "Oh god, what am I doing here?" panic that comes with the first few days of being in Beijing with a far-flung return date. This time, it's made sharper by the fact that Wai Lee is here. I spent a solid few hours last night worried about tomorrow morning when he has to go off to work by himself and doesn't speak or read Chinese. I'm worried about my own ability to not get lost going to work and I have some of my bearings, he has none. 

We're supposed to be getting phones today, so at least we'll be able to reach each other. Wewere supposed to get them yesterday, but we walked into a China Mobile store yesterday and I just hit my limit. We'd already struggled with getting the cab driver to the hostel from the airport in the middle of the night, struggled with why the hostel was suddenly double the price that I had reserved online, struggled with not being able to access the internet at all, especially not gmail or facebook. We'd already walked/dragged all our stuff to a new hotel in the morning, gone back to the hostel and checked out, tried to find something to eat that wouldn't break both our stomachs. And I've never bought a smartphone, even in English. Suddenly, I just didn't trust myself to not get it wrong. But we're having brunch with Wai Lee's boss in a little bit and he's agreed to help us buy some phones. 

I'm holding out hope that this feeling will dissipate as we find an apartment, find a routine, meet some people, really get our bearings. We've finally figured out internet (for the most part, sometimes it craps out for no reason). I think the blog will be good for more long-form updates/documenting what's going on here, but blogs are a one-way flow of information. We want to hear from you guys too! Send us emails! Even just short ones :)

Here We Go!

The bags have been packed and weighed and measured and weighed again. I'm trying not to freak out that our luggage doesn't comply with the American Airlines dimension guidelines. I'm trying not to freak out about a lot of different things right now. I think I'll be excited again once we get through bag check and security. But for now, it's time to gather up all our bags and head to the Blue Line for one last ride up to O'Hare. Next time I post, we'll be in Beijing!