Biking: The Ultimate Challenge

So, I decided to start off this post with a quick correction of a commonly held belief. "X is like biking, once you learn, you never forgot." Yeah, we've all heard that, right? It's completely and utterly untrue. I come from a place where you either walk, or you take a car. Biking is rare, Things are just too far. Here in Japan, everyone owns a bike: You, your best friend, your best friend's grandma, the three-year old kid down the street who just learned to walk. Everyone, and I mean everyone, bikes here. That means that people like me who haven't biked in a good 5 years are at a disadvantage. And if you believed that nonsense about never forgetting how to bike you're at more of a disadvantage.

Here you will navigate small streets, keep in mind the age of some of these cities and the population living within them. You will also navigate around cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, and fellow bikers. Bikes are treated as vehicles here. That means also if you've hit someone, you get charged as a vehicle. It's bad, very bad.

So, why am I bringing this up? Because

1. I suck at biking. And I'm not being modest here. I honestly and truly am terrible at this. Those three year old kids who just learned to bike? Yeah, they're better than me.

2. I already wiped out once while trying to get onto a curb. It hurt like crap, and I was a little beaten up for a while. I managed to avoid the cars going past me though, and I only damaged myself.

3. Unfortunately, I got in another bike accident today. I was avoiding some other obstacle, and was checking to the side, and then noticed there was a person in front of me. I wasn't even going that fast, and I tried to purposefully roll my bike in order to not hit them, but I clipped them anyway. Unfortunately, they fell despite my best intentions. Luckily, it was another student and they only escape with a minor scrape on their arm, but it could have been much worse. Some bystanders decided to take us both to the student health center since my nose was kind of gushing blood (somehow I'd managed to hit it), and we wanted to check on the girl I hit. It seems we're both ok, and I hope nothing else comes of it, but this biking thing just might kill me.

Michelle