Monday, October 6, 2008

We got Bikes!!


We got ourselves a nice pair of matching granny-bikes complete with fenders and baskets. This is me with them at the shore near our apartment.



The other picture is another view of the same beach. Nice and sandy with palm trees and the whole nine yards. Now that we've got the bikes we can explore a lot better. Japan in general is about a million times more bicycle friendly than Canada. For one thing pretty much all the roads are flat as opposed to hilly. Another thing is that everything is fairly compact due to the high population density and you don't have to travel long distances to get around.

Best of all though is that unlike Canada in Japan you are allowed to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk instead of being forced to risk life and limb battling it out with cars and trucks on the street. This may seem unfair to pedestrians, but in big cities they build wider sidewalks so there is room for cyclists and pedestrians to use them without running into each other.

Of course in the countryside they don't have sidewalks so there are some limitations, but you can generally get by there because the vehicular traffic is a lot lighter.

At any rate where we are there are plenty of wide sidewalks so we are having a good time peddling around and exploring the neighborhood.