Nia Hao!

What a fantastic day!!! :-) :-) :-)

Today we went to the Trek Bicycle office here in Beijing to say hello and to get a few of our belongings that we had shipped there in advance (most importantly our Mandarin language book and dictionary!). Needless to say, the journey itself presented an interesting challenge...

As always, we decided to make our own way there and not get a taxi. We thought that we would be able to walk to Trek by simply following Jingshun Road (where Trek is located), it seemed very straight forward - luckily most of the main roads have their pinyin equivalents written under the Chinese characters. We walked for about 90 minutes in total. None of the buildings on Jingshun road had any numbers that we could see (we knew that Trek was number 52, Building C) which made our locating it quite a task, we did not know whether we were walking in the right direction or not. We tried to ask a number of people directions and were sent one way or another. We thought that we were actually getting somewhere because we were closing the gap having walked left and right however even though we had found number 25, we were still no where nearer. Finally we went into a flower store, we tried to converse in Mandarin but luckily for us the women at the counter knew a little English. I gave her Kai at Trek's phone number and she called him from her mobile. From this we were told that we had to catch the 915 bus and that we would ride for 20 minutes or so! She even wrote the characters for us so that we could show the bus conductor our destination. This was great. Still, we discovered how far out we were from Trek, we were quite spatially unaware of distance involved.

We arrived at Trek quite easily having spotted the Trek sign :-) :-) :-) There was nobody there however a lovely man who spotted us told us to wait (through hand signals) whilst he went and found somebody. We met 2 of the guys from distribution (we think, their English was as varied as our Mandarin :-) who knew that we may have come to collect the bikes. There was nobody else around because there was a problem with the electricity in the area and everybody was either away on business or working from home. The office was familiar, it did feel a little like a home away from home - there was a Fuel EX on display and other bikes, posters of Lance and cycling paraphernalia dotted here and there. Ah fantastic - I love bikes and I absolutley loved working at Trek, it was simply great to be in the Beijing office.

We were presented with our bikes, these are 4500 WSD 2007 models. They were perfectly set up for us and only needed some fine tuning fit adjustments (photos to follow soon). We were given our box and claimed our pump, helmets and tools as well as our much desired language books. Surprisingly we could take the bikes away with us - we did not need to hold back. Our bikes were fitted with cages and a bottle each and we were sent on our way. We could not say xie xie (thank you) or hen hao (very good) enough.

We have just spent the afternoon riding around Beijing heading downtown and back.... WOW WOW WOW WOW. :-) :-) :-)

I am so unbelievably happy. We have seen the most amazing sights already, Beijing is truly a world class city. Many people ride bikes here, there are cycle lanes everywhere so travelling via pedal power is easy. We have ridden through Tian'anmen square and cruised down the wide avenues adjacent to it which are lined with the most modern architecture, everything so well lit and bright.

So, we have ridden about about 20 miles, we have conversed in Mandarin and as a result have fried our brains as well as our bodies. We are toast. We are very tired but probably two of the most happiest people in the world right now.

So Zaijian, until tomorrow. Thanks for reading.