Tuesday, 10 July 2012
I think I'm getting old
titanic fail
Chinese people love the film titanic, so much so that I am lucky enough to hear 'my heart will go on' on a daily basis. And now they have sunk to a new low with this.
Friday, 6 July 2012
e-bikes
7. Ebike
I mentioned in an earlier Blog about ebikes, electric bikes,
which whiz silently along the roads and stand very noisily and obstructively on
the pavements. Due to the very high
temperatures and humidity over summer I though I would get one, and as my
friend already bought one I thought it would be fun to go out on exploratory
city rides together. It set me back £180, and costs about 20p to
recharge, which will take you 20 kilometres.
To convert that in to petrol prices, I get over 400 miles to the gallon
on this Hog. To drive it once around the
world would set you back the equivalent of 277 litres of petrol. Anyhoo, apart from being extremely economical
it also looks the part, and gets a lot of stares from the locals despite the
fact that there are thousands thronged across the streets. It feels great to ride, especially as summer
is in full swing and it’s nearly always mid thirties. Walking even a short
distance leaves you hot and sweaty, but the ebike gives you a nice breeze to
sit back and relax in as you dodge the potholes, drain covers, cars, trucks,
people blindly walking across the road, people blindly driving across the road
and of course all the other ebikes. It
has foot peddles in case you run out of juice or encounter a particularly nasty
slope. It’s a funny feeling when you
pedal and open up the throttle at the same time, you feel like Lance Armstrong
effortlessly accelerating away. You
certainly don’t feel like Lance Armstrong when you run out of battery though,
pedalling alone will require a lot of effort to keep up walking speed. There are luckily however, charge points
around the city, which will give your battery a speed charge for 20 or 30p.
As you can see from the photos she is a beauty, and as her
Chinese name is 小鸟 xiǎoniǎo with 小 xiǎo meaning small and 鸟 niǎo meaning bird, I think it translates
in to ‘the millennium falcon’.
Quite a few of the EF ream now have E-bikes and we have
formed our own E-bike gang, ‘the easy laowaiders’,
for those of you who don’t know, laowai is the name for ‘foreigner’ that
Chinese people shout at us from across the street when they can’t remember how
to say ‘heellloooooo’.
Below is a picture of the bikes specifications, I though you
might not be able to understand so I translated it.
1. This is the battery, where the plutonium rods are housed
2. The Flux Capacitor
3. The pillion seat
4. This stops the passenger from getting thrown off the back under extreme acceleration
5. Hydraulics, that’s how I roll!
8. May look like a brake disk but this is actually the power station, which generates the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed
9. Rear centre stand, perfect for applying the tyre warmers
21. basket storage unit
23. Primary thrust control
24. This actually does nothing at all, but the lever that you can’t see on the other side will kind of slow you down a bit if you pull hard on it.
this is also an e-bike
E-bikes are also very convenient for transporting things!
or taking long road trips!
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