First bike ride in Kobe

My bicycle, an assemblage of components collected and organized for me by a savvy family member (thanks Dolan!) accompanied me as a second piece of luggage on my flight to Japan, three weeks ago. This machine was disassembled and packed into a box, secured, tied, and padded for travel. At the airport, my bicycle and I were informed that bicycles aren`t luggage, they`re a special item, applying to tickets bought after a specific date. I considered turning back there and then, but didn`t.

Arriving at the Hyogo International House twelve hours later, I fell asleep reading the copious instructions and rules regulating occupation of the dorm room. I had already broken a few rules just getting in the door: no shoes on in the room. no bicycles in the room. Oops.

As I recovered from jet lag and made my first foray about town by foot and then about the country by train, my bicycle waited patiently in its box. As promised, there certainly are many other bicycles here, and only a few of them are locked. Of those that are locked, the lock is a skimpy cable that anybody from a city in the U.S. would wonder whey she was even going to the trouble. When you go out, you find a group of other bicycles and put yours with those ones. They seem to stick together that way. A main advantage my bicycle has over those other bicycles is that it has a sophisticated gear system, so I can go up steep hills. A disadvantage is that it`s the only one without a kickstand. That may not seem like such a big deal, but if yours is the only one that doesn`t have a kickstand, it makes you look silly, and it also makes parking difficult.

Finally it was time to free my bike from its box. The first step was to figure out how to dispose of the packaging. Here, the trash system is highly regulated and specific. A main topic of both my orientation to the dormitory and my orientation to the university was the proper method of separating trash. You need to buy three different types of plastic bags: for combustible garbage, non-combustible garbage (including packaging but excluding bottles and cans), and non-combustible garbage (meaning bottles and cans). People actually self-organize and follow rules about their personal life and trash-sorting methods, unlike at home where in a similar situation I might have just found an open dumpster.

Once my bicycle was liberated, and I eventually sorted out the packaging, it was time to take my first ride. I found a sporting goods store where I pumped the tires, and then I rode over to a nearby hardware store to get one last tiny wrench for the rack. I reassembled everything and was ready to go by sunset.