My two friends from San Francisco wanted to come out on the road bike ride. Tom had arranged two nice road bikes for them. I had tried to have somebody write down the address of the meeting point the night before. But that seemed to have failed. And the bigger problem was that they did not have a working phone. So there Tom, the other cyclists and me were waiting for them. At a certain point the group left and I continued waiting. I got fascinated by this mountain bike. Can you find out why?
A typical old Chinese bike will always have the saddle holder mounted pointing forward, so that the saddle would be mostly in front of the saddle post. My theory is that the huge bikes were uncomfortable for the mainly small Chinese so they just started installing the saddles that way round. But for this mountain bike it looked like the stem was mounted the opposite way. That was never an option for the old bikes, because they did not have any stem.
For my friends: We actually did meet that day. They found somebody with a mobile phone and had her call me. Then we actually did ride a bit through Beijing and up to Wangjing and a nearby country side market. It was quite nice despite the cold temperature (much colder than the day before) and the dark clouds that were always giving the impression that it would start to rain any minute.