I Bought a Bike - Teddy McCormick

This is old news; I'm pretty sure I've mentioned here that I bought a bike last month. But I love it so much that I need to talk about it.

I'll start with the bike itself, because it's actually really nice despite having some obvious reasons why someone replaced it.

The Japanese word for bicycle is 自転車, or 'jitensha.'

So like first off, it's gorgeous? I love the color and it's in great shape cosmetically. It's got some damage that makes me wonder what on earth kind of accident it was in - the mudcovers (is that what they're called?) over the tires were both bent out of shape (the back one needed to be bent back by hand; it was rubbing against the tire otherwise) and some of the wire in the basket is damaged. But other than that it works great; it changes gears smoother than any bike I've had before, it's got a built-in self-powered light, it's just great. A little small for me, but that's true of most bikes in America, so I can handle it.

Bike laws in Japan were recently made more strict but they're actually all very commonsense; I was worried when I first heard there had been changes, but it's actually all stuff I'd already internalized. Don't have two people on one bike, pedestrians have right-of-way on sidewalks, don't run stop signs, etc. It took about 30 seconds of mental adjustment to bike on the left side of the road instead of the right side, but other than that I was fine from the word go.

The great thing about having a bike is how much of the city it opens up to me. Hakodate is actually pretty flat, so there's nowhere that's a big pain to bike to, and there's tons of places that are like 20 minutes by bike but an hour walking or bussing. Even when I have the time, even when bussing isn't that annoying, there's a huge mental hurdle that committing to a 2-hour round trip has that a <1 hour trip doesn't.

And then because of that, I'm seeing more of the city than I ever did before. Even when I'm going to the same places, biking lets me alter my routes and see new sights; taking the trams or the busses meant I was always taking the same journeys even when they were to different places.

If not for biking, I wouldn't have been riding past the beach on a sunny day and realized I needed to swim! Which will lead to a new blog post soon about our beach trip the other day!

Plus, biking is just, you know, fun. It feels great! Especially in hot weather; with the breeze just from motion, I'd rather bike than walk even if it didn't save me any time at all. I know I'll have to deal with it somehow when I leave - sell it or give it away or whatever - but it will have 100% been worth it.