Thursday, February 12, 2009


July 7, 2008 - Xindian riverside bikeway near the Gongguan entrance.


December 20, 2008 - Same bridge, but from the south.

As they say in Taiwan, "Spring has sprung!". Oh wait, they don't say that here, that's what we say in the U.S., they say "春天到了", which means Spring has arrived, but to make it more interesting, the whole phrase is indicated by the character for "Spring" upside-down, since the character for "arrive", 到, is a homonym for "to turn upside-down", 倒.

Geddit? They sure go a long way to be clever.

So with nice sunny and warm days (before humidity and sweltering tropical heat kicks in starting around next month), I've been trying to get out on my bike as much as possible during the day. I'll switch to night riding once the daytime gets too hot.

Not that it's been that long since the last real ride, December - I usually stop riding during the Winter and have to train back up to form come Spring - but I'm doing a "training" regimen of 100 miles on the flat riverside bikeways, and then once I accumulate 100 miles, I start hitting the local hills, and then after that I'll start doing the longer rides and bigger mountains.

iTunes soundtrack:
1. We'll Let You Know (King Crimson)
2. Green (Throwing Muses)
3. Plane Crash in C (Rilo Kiley)
4. Free Four (Pink Floyd)
5. Kokuu (Katsuya Yokoyama - shakuhachi)
6. Want More (Bob Marley & the Wailers)
7. Long Knives (Rainer Maria)
8. Emerald Lies (Marillion)
9. No Language in Our Lungs (XTC)
10. Ritual Dance (Michael Hedges)

3 comments:

Pierre said...

Thanks for the 倒/到 thing, I didn't know that!

I love the way Chinese can be shortened to death and yet understood by all the Chinese speakers!

You're lucky to get nice weather. Here it's a weird one: a couple of days ago we got a huge storm with 120km/h winds and all, before that it snowed, and now it's just cold. Like 1 °C (really not enough!).

As for the 100 miles (which means about 160 km), do you do that in a day?!

joyce said...

lucky...i wish it were spring here! we had nice weather last week, but had some snow a couple days ago, and another storm is moving in. *sigh*

i love pics of reflections on water. i dunno why. something very peaceful about it to me.

Anonymous said...

Some crazy weather in Europe, I hear from CNN.

Not in 1 day. I've never ridden a century in one day. I think I'd hurt myself really bad if I tried.

Denver has 4 seasons, right? If it's anything like the northeast, spring doesn't really come until April. Bay Area should start getting nice about now, too.