Bicycles

I have a bicycle now! A— found an ad on the internet for some 5000 yen used bikes, and gave me a map to find the place. I had no idea what the scale of the map was, but I think that I wound up walking about 3 kilometers before I reached the place... only it wasn't the right place. I found a bike shop, but the owner told me that it wasn't the one on my map. I really didn't care though; he had some nice new bikes for about 10,000 yen, and since I figured it would cost me 18,000 yen to use the train every day buying the bike at that price seemed like a good deal. Also, I really didn't want to walk all the way back home. This was the third time in my life that I had walked so far to a bike shop that I was unwilling to leave without a bike (it's also happened in Albuquerque and Seattle!). The bicycle is one of the sort of practical city bikes that you can't find in the states. It has a basket for carrying stuff, fenders to keep the rain off your pants, and a headlamp that is powered by pedaling. It's only one speed though, and I don't think I can adjust the seat to be high enough for complete leg extension, so going up hills is a bit of a struggle. Fortunately the route to work isn't so hilly. My 40-50 minute train commute is now a 20 minute bike commute, and that was on my first try while I was lost and confused most of the way! One thing I didn't count on though was how much I would sweat. I figured it wouldn't be much worse than from the walk, but when I arrived my back was completely soaked (I'm sure that wearing the backpack was not helping things.) Did I mention that I'm giving a presentation today? In the future I'll wear a tshirt in and change into my work clothes after I arrive, but for today I just went into a bathroom stall and tried to towel off my back and shirt using toilet paper :P If anyone is interested in how I deal with trash, check out these instructions. It's very complicated! I think that if I mess up the Yakuza will kill me in my sleep or something, so I'd better figure this out quickly. A few hours of work today, and then the weekend starts. I wonder if I'll be able to muster the energy to venture in to town. I've been pretty tired in the evenings, but that's probably because I've had to do tiring errands (such as lugging duffel bags around or walking several miles to buy a bicycle.)