One of the most fun days we had was spent bicycling around Beijing with all the other hundreds and thousands of locals on their bikes. This is just the most perfect city for bicycling. The bike lanes are really wide and the other traffic is used to dealing with lots of bikes so it is not quite as unnerving as it is here... now with that said it is still quite an unnerving experience when you get to a crowded intersection with traffic coming from every direction and more bikes and pedestrians added into the mix but still I loved it! It almost makes me want to go biking with Paul around here. The other component of biking in Beijing is it was totally FLAT... absolutely NO hills!
Heidi and Eric have quite the collection of bikes at their house... some they brought from Arizona with them and others they have bought since they arrived in China, just for the purpose of getting out and about. They have baby seats on two of their bikes and I probably took Capri or Connor out for a bike ride almost everyday just around Heidi's neighborhood. It was so much fun. We would ride out of her neighborhood and ride through the nearby Chinese neighborhoods which was so interesting to see normal daily life up close and very personal. One Saturday we ventured out to go to the tailor's shop but Eric wasn't exactly sure how to get there. After riding for about 45 minutes it started to rain so we pulled over and went into a wonderful restaurant and enjoyed a delicious lunch until it quit raining. We never did get to the tailor's shop but we saw alot of scenery that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. Both Capri and Connor fell asleep in their bike seats before we even got back home. It was a great outing.
Heidi and Eric love to take their visitors downtown to bike through the city. We loaded up all those bikes you see in the pictures into their van and drove downtown. We parked at the Workers Stadium -- I think that is where the soccer games will be held during the Olympics. Then we all got on our bikes and took off for a good 4 or 5 hours worth of biking. We just followed Eric and tried to stick together. It is amazing how liveable Beijing is. People live in all kinds of situations from high rise apartment buildings to the ancient Hutongs. Do you know about the Hutongs? They are really, really old teeny, tiny homes that are probably hundreds of years old. For the most part they don't have electricity or running water. Many, many of these have been torn down to make way for new buildings and more modern structures but the ones that have survived are just astounding. They are built so close together with just narrow alleyways that run through them. They are behind tall walls so it is hard to see what it is really like inside the walls but when you get to sneak a peak you can't imagine living there. I guess the city has been trying to update some of the areas and even bring in electricity. Since they don't have running water to each home, there is a public restroom for common use within these compounds. Paul used a few of these facilities but I never ventured in. Of course, the accommodations were all "squatters" not "western" toilets... yeh, quite authentic!
It is so hard to try to put into words to describe this amazing experience. I just have to say it was one of the highlights of our trip. We figured we rode about 15 miles. We rode down a street that was lined with foreign Embassys including the huge Russian one. That was cool. The Chinese love to put guards in front of everything and everywhere (remember, lots of people need lots of jobs) so there were young Chinese men standing guard, looking very official, in so many locations along our way. I just can't even begin to describe what we saw... it just wouldn't do it justice. We ended our ride by having dinner at the Swapp's favorite western pizza place, the kro's nest. It was a great meal to top off another great day!
