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Archive for the ‘Beijing’ Category

La Ba Jie – Festival

Dienstag, Januar 11th, 2011

Today is the 8th day of the 12th moon month (also called „La“) – so like Dec 8th of the moon calendar. In Chinese „Ba“ means 8 and „Jie“ means festival. So today is Dec 12th festival. And what would you eat on such a day? Of course La Ba Zhou which is Dec 12th porridge. I would not have known what to put inside. But Master Liu went out and bought each of the ingredients separately and mixed a bag for me and one bag for Dupree to take home and cook. This is my bag of ingredients:

La Ba Zhou Ingredients

I do not know the names of all the different kind of beans that exist in China but I spotted at least 5 different kinds in this bag.It was the first time for me to cook this kind fo zhou and it seemed to take forever (more than 1 hour) for the beans to get soft. I added raisins and some sugar and then celebrated this late and exhausted.

La Ba Zhou Ready to Eat

P.S.: After I made this blog entry my mother sent me the following picture of the ingredients she uses for an Italian dish. And that looks amazingly similar to the Chinese La Ba Zhou. How interesting 🙂

Italian Ingredients

Posted in Beijing, China | 1 Comment »

First Beijing FG Ride 2011

Montag, Januar 10th, 2011

Thanks to Mitchell we organized a fixed gear bike ride on a freezing cold Monday night. I mean it was below zero in teh daytime and of course even more below zero at night. It is the first ride of the year 2011 of the Beijing fixed gear crew. I was thinking that maybe only 5 people would show up. But no! We were in the end 12 people that cycled with us and most of them on nice Natooke bikes.

Tom asked me to point out that Garth only sand papered half of his handlebar and came on our ride with a half black half silver bullhorn. That is barely recognizable due to the dim light on this picture:

Garth with 2 colored handlebar

Brad and Renfei also came along on the ride.

Beijing Fixed Gear Riders

We followed Mitchell’s suggestion to ride to the Beijing 798 art district. As always I chose the path all the way along the canal as it is off the main roads and has less cars.It would be cool if it would be for bikes only though…

Cycling along a canal in Beijing City

It was great to have 12 rider come out on their fixed gear bikes. In Dashanzi 798 we went to a statue of a fat man and took a picture for those who did not ride with us.

Beijing FG Night Ride Crew

Garth then led us on a tour around the closed art galleries till we got surrounded by wolves. I could just move my foot fast enough away.

Wolf biting a fixed gear bike pedal

I uploaded all my pictures onto a web album. Go here to check out more pictures with the wolves.

Also Garth’s saddle seemed to be tasty. But we could get it back without too much damage.

Wolf biting in a fixed gear bike saddle

Dupree helped us get the wolves away from us. Amazing how he knows how to ride such wild and vicious animals.

Dupree riding a wolf

But he did decide to switch back to his bike and go for dinner with us. Good that post bike Steve came to the ride as he knows the area really well and showed a small but tasty restaurant that had Shanxi style noodles served from a gigantic huge pot. Sorry I did not take a picture of it. But I did take a picture of our colorful unique bikes.

Fixed Gear Bikes in Beijing

Natooke Flying Banana Bikes resting after a Ride

After the dinner we took a group photo of the 8 guys and 4 girls that were tough enough to ride on such a cold night.

Fixed Gear Night Bike Ride Crew

Posted in Beijing, China, Cycling, Fixed Gear | 1 Comment »

Natooke Bike with Basket

Montag, Januar 10th, 2011

This is a really cool handlebar basket. It is done by Copenhagen parts. Our customer wanted us to build up a beautiful Flying Banana fixed gear bike with this special handlebar from Denmark.

Natooke Bike with Cool Basket

It is one piece handlebar together with basket. He wanted the basket in white but could only get it in silver. Even in silver I think it looks amazing together with the white bicycle.

Handlebar Basket in one Piece

I trust the design to be good. Even though the rim of the basket seems very low. But I assume it rides well. If more people are interested I might import them.

Daenish Design Handlebar

Bruce from Beijing Radio came to the shop today and interviewed me regarding bikes and cycling in Beijing. He will make 2 or 3 features out of it. Next Monday Jan 17th there will be an interactive radio show about cycling safety from 2-3pm and again from 6-7pm. Go to th Radio Beijing website and listen along.

Posted in Beijing, China, Fixed Gear, Natooke | 1 Comment »

Natooke Fixie and Chinese Twitter

Sonntag, Januar 9th, 2011

Unfortunately I forgot my camera at home today. But Dupree helped me take a picture of the one bike that was picked up today. She has selected cool Wellgo pedals changing the color from light blue in artificial light to purple matching her tires when outdoors.

Fixed Gear Bike from Natooke

This evening I went for a nice relaxing foot massage with my friend Bijan. We chatted forever after the massage. It was nice to see him after such a long time.

Dupree has been so good posting something on our Natooke Chinese twitter site so that he received the 100 days batch (award) for posting 100 days in a row! If you are signed up please follow our tweets!

Posted in Beijing, China, Fixed Gear, Natooke | 1 Comment »

A Day in the Store

Samstag, Januar 8th, 2011

Today was a nice day in the store. It was nice to have Dupree and Master Liu as well as Fred now working at Natooke. We had quite a few things to do with some minor annoying things that took much longer than expected.

One customer brought us a handlebar he had bought in Europe and wants installed on his bike. It is a basket integrated in a handlebar. I love what is written on the box explaining what you could for example fit inside that basket. Here a picture of it.

What you can fit in a Handlebar-basket

Fred helped us work on 2 bikes. We all stayed quite long and Dupree suggested to all have dinner together to celebrate my return. Of course I accepted. And I was happy we went to a Beijing style hotpot restaurant on Ghost street. We ordered thin lamb meat and different thin lamb meat and another kind of thinlamb meat some other dishes of lamb meat. 🙂 That was a cool Natooke dinner!

Beijing Style Hotpot

Posted in Beijing, Natooke | 1 Comment »

Trick Bike of Mitchell

Freitag, Januar 7th, 2011

It is nice to have such a sunny day despite the cold. But the shop was quite chilly so I decided to turn on the air conditioning even though t is such an electricity sucker. At least now I do not have frozen fingers while typing.

Mitchell had dropped off his Natooke fixed gear bike yesterday wanting to have the crank changed, the thin classy pedals with steel cages and leather double strap changed to nylon platform pedals with a wide trickster strap with velcro. He also wanted to change his tires from the 700x23c to the Vittoria Randonneur Cross tire 700x28c. These changes give his bike a whole new look.

New Trickster Fixie

Mitchell and his Natooke Fixed Gear Bike

I also like the choice of spoke cards. One is from our fixed gear revolution II event August 2010, one is from my friend Arnon that I brought back from Israel, and another is from my friend Tomity-san from Japan that Tomity-san gave me last year. 🙂

Cool spoke cards in Fixie Wheel

Posted in Beijing, Fixed Gear, Natooke | Comments Closed

Natooke Bikes and Scam

Donnerstag, Januar 6th, 2011

I am happy to be back in my bike shop in Beijing. Dupree had a hard time taking care of the shop alone, especially because he caught a cold. He is still not feeling totally well yet. He had to do 2 TV interviews and talk about our shop and fixed gear bikes in China. One was the Hebei TV station, the otehr was the Liaoning TV station that brought a lot of famous people to the shop and filmed him while he was building up the a bike for a customer. I am looking forward to seeing those TV shows.

He took some pictures of the bikes he built up during my vacation. I like this Flying Banana with the purple Oury grips matching the platform pedals and the light green KMC chain matching the fixed gear hubs and the cool Taiwanese Duro tires:

Cool Flying Banana Fixed Gear Bike

Cool green and purple color combinations

And this is a more classic dark colored aluminum fixed gear bike that a customer built up together with Dupree.

Natooke aluminum Fixie

Classic Style Dark Fixed Gear Bike

And here is a nice one of my friend Lao Zhou who can ride a unicycle and now wants to learn some tricks on a fixed gear bike.

Red Trick Fixie for Lao Zhou

Fixed Gear Bicycle for Playing Around

And Dupree told me about a scam around our Natooke bike shop!!! He said a guy came in with a cheap fixed gear bike and wanted him to change something on it. The guy said this is a Natooke bike. Dupree said he is 100% sure that we never had such a shitty frame and those cheap parts. The guy said he did not personally buy it in the shop but his friend recommended to contact some guy via the Chinese instant messaging system QQ. That guy supposedly can get the good Natooke bikes at 2000.-RMB. So the guy that walked into our shop actually thought he was buying a Natooke bike and saving a lot of money. The guy doing the scam had handed over the bike near the Lama Temple to the guy buying it claiming that he just got it from the Natooke shop! This is outrageous! There is a Chinese guy selling shitty fixed gear bikes and claiming they are from Natooke!!! If someone claims he is selling you a bike from Natooke feel free to contact us and ask us if t is actually a bike from us. Our shop number is 010-8402 6925. DO NOT BE TRICKED BY SUCH A SCAM!

On the positive side that means that people trust us for good quality. And we are getting famous. Let’s see what the next scam will be or how many other people will be fooled by this gangster.

Posted in Beijing, China, Cycling, Fixed Gear, Natooke | 1 Comment »

Natooke Store listed on PCPOP

Donnerstag, Januar 6th, 2011

My plane had just barely landed when I received a call from TimeOut. An editor from TimeOut wanted a short interview about our fixed gear bike club. She said it will be published in the February edition.

Today we found that we are listed on a website called PCPOP. They must have come to our shop in September 2010 looking at the pictures they uploaded. Here is the link to the full article. They wrote very detailed in Chinese about our store in Beijing and took nice pictures. Here are some:

Natooke Store from the Entrance

Bicycle and Juggling Shop Natooke

Fixed Gear Bicycle Shop in China

The best Bike Shop in China

Media in the Entrance of the Natooke shop

Posted in Beijing, China, Fixed Gear, Media, Natooke | 1 Comment »

Skiing and Mistletoe

Sonntag, Januar 2nd, 2011

When we arrived at the top of Nassfeld ski resort this morning there were strange clouds just on the tip of the mountains like here hanging over the Trogkofel.

Trogkofel summit covered by a cloud

Soon more clouds started creeping down – they were coming from all directions – and even more came covering the sky.

Clouds creeping in

At lunch time it was completely overcast. And as the clouds were hanging low in some areas we did not have good sight. But in the late afternoon the spots of blue sky increased. At one point there were clouds and fog on the one side of the mountain and blue sky and sunshine on the other. SO of course we skied on the sunny side.

Clouds in the West, Blue sky in the East

While we were skiing my parents had gone to get some mistletoe. They grow on some trees in some areas if the air is really clean. My parents know some spots where there are some here in Carinthia. This year they only found some high up on trees. Almost risking their lives and breaking the ski pole they managed to get some mistletoe. They hung it in the apartment so that we could kiss below it. And so we did.

pic 4 Kissing below the Mistletoe

As every day we have delicious dinner. Today we had pork fillet in red wine sauce with onions and olives. And then we played our fun card game. Yes, agaiin.

Posted in Beijing | 1 Comment »

STC on CRI

Dienstag, Dezember 21st, 2010

China Radio International (CRI) came a week ago to film Shannon and me regarding our „Smarter than Car“ (STC).

Shannon interviewed by CRI

Here is the link to the video CRI made introducing what our mission in Beijing is. They wrote:

Beijing is a city made for cycling. There are designated bike lanes. You can lock up your two-wheeler almost anywhere. And, the city is as flat as a pancake. So why is Beijing jam-packed with vehicles? An organization called „Smarter Than Car“ is trying to change that. It is reviving pedal power in the city. Liu Bing reports.

Posted in Beijing, China, Cycling, Green, Media | 1 Comment »

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