I personally associate Heidi to the green grass and high mountains of Switzerland. Well, last night I meet one Heidi in Beijing and we went together back home.Yesterday I went to a goodbye dinner of a Chinese Friend - Jing. She will be travelling next Tuesday to Zurich where she got a scholarship for a year.
We, two French friends – Dominique and Lucie – and I were talking about some of our experiences abroad to Jing during the evening. She was the first time going to live abroad. Some of the things we were talking about were: What really makes you go abroad and what you think that makes you go abroad. How you tend to be a bit more sensible when you are abroad and your feeling can go up and down more easily. What you learn from the new places but also from your own country, own family and friends back at home. Well, in the end, I think we all agree that to go abroad is at least something positive.
During the coffee time after dinner we were chatting about Jing´s belongings that she planned to left behind in Beijing. One of them was a bike parked at one of the new Beijing metro stations. She started to describe it: It was also green like the grass Jing was going to see few days latter at the Swiss mountains. Only a bit darker due to some of the rust accumulated over the years sleeping outside in Beijing. Because in Beijing you do not see people sleeping on the street at night but you see thousand of bikes, that unfortunately have less and less space due to the rapid increase in the number of cars. Only in Beijing over 1000 cars each day are been registered (i.e. around 400.000 cars a year). Bikes here tend to have a front basket and Jing describ plastic bag band from June 2008e it as white. Bike seats very often are cover with a plastic bag, a bit more scare now after the. In this case Jing, due to the large number of plastic bags she used during the last few days of packing had problems remembering the one she left on top of the bike seta. She could not remember if was the emperor colour (yellow), the lucky colour (reed) or most likely something in between (orange).
After such a good description I asked her if the bike had a name. She said that the bike did not have name until then, but due to the flexibility of the Chinese church she could baptize the bike from the distance and that particular point in time. The bike then was just baptized with the name of Heidi. So I new how Heidi was but had not met Heidi yet.
We said good bye to each other and I went to take the underground. Unfortunately when I arrived to the station it just closed few minutes before. So, my friend Dominique who was with her bike nicely took me to pick up Heidi and after 45 minutes we reached the parking where Heidi supposed to be parked.
These bike parking are open 24 hours. One of the guards when we arrived about to sleep on top of few bikes. We were lucky because at this time of the day the parking is quite empty, so the searching exercise was going to be easier. We start to look for the bike and use the hint of the plastic bag. Although it did not help, because only two bikes had one bag on top of the seat and none of them were green nor anything similar. The white basket and green colour head us to find it. The locker did resist a bit before we managed to unlocked. By then, I realised I have personally met Heidi.
Still not everything over. With the receipt hanging the bike we founded out that had been 10 days. The rate per day I was initially told by Jing was of 0,05 Eur per day, but the guard wanted me to charge me 0,1 Eur per day (taking advantage of foreigners…), so we had a bit of bargaining which end up in 0,06 Eur per day. So, the total investment in a polluting-free bike was 0,6 Eur. Before leaving I also had to signed and write my phone number on the guard log book. Dominique give me instructions of how to get back home, we said goodbye and I started to ride well after midnight during half an hour more until I reached home together with Heidi, my new bike.
