Biking

I was a biker for a year. It was my last year in the U. I took over the bike that my housemate had owned. I was living in the same place for the last 3 years and I only realised belatedly that a bike would have drastically improved my quality of life. Stupid stupid me….

I had held back from getting a bike because I saw that much of my campus was on hilly ground. Yes, but most of the campus also lies on a plateau, so if you avoid certain routes, and if you avoid cycling into town, it’s quite manageable to bike. This is certainly not NUS where every single road is sloped.

Yes, I wear a helmet. I used to joke to my friend Nat that Indians have something in their DNA that makes them persistently engage in risky behaviour in traffic. (cf the infamous Indian Jaywalker). Well now I see he doesn’t believe in helmets either. I wore one because I saw all the bikers in my school wear one, so I didn’t give it a second thought. And it’s not like I was ever going to sweat into that helmet because I’m never there during the summer, and any other part of the year, that helmet’s going to keep you warm.

On the first day I had the bike, my old housemate had chained it to a pipe in the basement. I didn’t know how to use a bicycle lock (and I think, today, I’ve also forgotten) so I had to ask a nice new housemate of mine to please teach me how the thing is done, and also please do not tell anybody the code.

I remember my old housemate once falling off her bike and getting grazed and whatever. It never became a problem with me. I never fell off my bike.

The bike was never about me loving the great outdoors and stuff. It was strictly about getting from point A to B. Yes, it is quite a bitch to be biking around in the slush, and you have to be very careful if there is ice around. But the area was generally very well maintained. The roads are well salted and everything. The rides were quite pleasant. I never need an iPod (and anyhow they didn’t exist in those days) because I can play Bill Evans piano solos in my head from memory so it was a good companion to my biking.

There was one time I was biking from the computer lab back to my place at 3 in the morning, and the whole place was under a blanket of snow. I thought to myself, “this is the most desolate place in the world”.

Blizzards though, are a different thing. I had to go bike my way to class in the middle of a blizzard, and by the time I got there, my pants were all drenched. I didn’t know where to park my bike because the bike park was under 1 foot of snow, but I chained the bike to something anyway. That was quite some experience.

I tend to struggle a bit when I am climbing up slopes. I avoid steeper slopes, but there was a medium slope in front of the engineering building. Once, I was cycling too far out and some redneck with a big beard and a big pickup (cliché I know but it did happen) nearly bumped into me. As I cycled on, he drove his truck alongside and screamed at us “bloody students” for endangering him and his children. I was thinking, yeh, I’m the dickhead but aren’t I going to be the one doing the dying when something bad happens?

Fortunately none of these things happened to me.

The academic year that I was biking was also the time when I learnt how to drive. Yes, I knew I was going to learn driving while in the States, and far away from the scoundrels who overcharge in Singapore but I waited 3 years to get this simple thing done. I’m such a procrastinator. I will tell you about it some day, just not today.

Thus concludes the first and probably only posting you will ever see about biking on my blog. I know that (cough cough) certain others can write reams and reams about it, but that is beyond my ability.