4.1.2011 von Ines.

This morning I got up early even though we did not go skiing. I saw that there were some clouds. When my mother got up she said it looks like the sun is hardly out and I told her that it is slightly cloudy. When we turned on the radio they mentioned the today will be a partial eclipse of the sun. And then finally someone said it is almost over. I rushed to the window and saw the last bits of it. Really nice! If I would have known earlier then we probably could have seen the 80% coverage that had been visible in southern Austria. Well the next full eclipse of the sun visible in Austria will be in 80 years.

The past few days have been very cold which has made very beautiful ice roses grow. I have not seen so many of these. They look almost like a coral reefs made out of ice.

We took a walk down to the bigger village. Here is a picture of my mother with the Gailtal valley in the background.

The family went together for a nice local meal at a restaurant a few villages away. They forgot to give me a side dish salad so then we got a wheat beer for free. And I had to realize that coke is more expensive than really good beer. We then drove to the Weissensee, a big lake of Carinthia that is frozen in winter.

It is very romantic there. They have sleighs pulled by horses running around on the frozen lake. They are really on to lake!

We heard that we can just rent ice skates at the sport shop on the northern coast of the lake. But as my mother gave me her ice skates we only needed to rent skates for Julien.When we entered the sport store we saw a huge empty shelf and the lady said she has only 1 last pair for rent but they are size 39. She said we could take a seat with teh others and wait for ice skates to be returned. As the sunwas about to set soon behind the mountain ridges we did not want to wait. So Julien and my parents walked on and around the lake.

While I went for a quick spin on ice skates on the 4.2km long loop. That was really nice.

The rest of the evening was packing suitcases and having a nice last dinner. It was such a great relaxing holiday. And it was so nice to spend so much time with my parents. Looking forward to them coming to Beijing in April this year!

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3.1.2011 von Ines.

Today was blue sky again. We were looking forward to a wonderful day of skiing. When we reached the top of the mountain at about 2000 meters we had the impression that it was cold. And after a while we realized it was actually freezing cold. I could soon not feel my toes and fingers anymore. But we were looking forward to lunch time with all the sun. I quickly went to a public toilet at the top of a ski lift and partially de-frosted my fingers on the heater. But they were soon frozen again.

Even at lunch time despite all the sun it was still very cold. We found a spot with almost no wind and a beautiful view.

But we could not remove our gloves nor hats nor jackets today. It was around -15 degrees Celcius and there was some wind.

I still did not get too many comments yet about my skis. A Slovenian guy pointed at my skis and said stuff to his friends while laughing. One Austrian pointed at my skis and told his friend “Those are skis”. The next sentence was that he got test skis from Fischer. Of course my skis are skis. The difference to the others is that they are completely straight. We spotted a guy wearing a neon orange and neon yellow and neon green ski suit with belt that looked like it was purchased in the 80’s. And guess what? He also had straight skis. Nowadays everybody has carving skis. It is much easier to ski with carving skis. You need much more technique to ski on straight skis. That is why I like them. I think it is like fixed gear biking. Of course the bike evolved from being fixed gear single speed when it was invented in 1880 to coasting single speed to the coasting multi speed we know today. But many people now chose the more technical fixed gear bikes from the old days. Skiing with straight skis is like riding a single speed bike. Closer to fixed gear cycling is skiing with Telemark technique like I did 2 years ago in France. But here in Austria the sport shops did not have Telemark skis for rent. Maybe I will buy some in future.

The wind kept going and the slopes stayed icy and hard. Even the off-piste which was nice the past few days was just frozen and icy today. So we called it a day even before the last lift went up the hill. I will probably not go skiing again this winter, but hopefully back country skiing next winter. And of course my back country skis are also straight. Actually back country skiing (that is walking up the hill and then skiing down) is as pure as fixed gear bike riding. Maybe that is why I love it too.

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1.1.2011 von Ines.

Today we had great weather again: Blue sky and sunshine. I like the view from the Italian side of the skiing resort towards south.

At the Gartnerkofel top hut we took some pictures. Despite the great weather nobody was in the beach chairs.

The great thing was that most people were sleeping in the morning so we had the ski slopes for ourselves. It is huge fun to ski on the fresh ski slopes. So we skied a lot. The majority of the people in the morning were elderly locals that enjoyed the great weather with us. I think that on average snow boarders drink more than skiers. And they seem to also be more hung over on New Years Day so they came later or not at all. It was nice to have less beginner snow boarders filling up the slopes.

Of course we again went off the slopes and did some off-piste skiing. In some areas the snow was still like powder but it has been a while since the last snow.

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31.12.2010 von Ines.

Amazing. Another beautiful day on top of the Carinthian mountains. Here is our shadow of us in a chair lift. I think that looks like 2 birds.

During our lunch we heard the helicopter come to the ski resort. And that is usually a bad sign. We were not sure if he was actually picking up an injured person as he was first flying around the whole resort. But it seems there was actually an injured person that probably did have some kind of head or back injury.

At the end of each day we do the long ride from the far top of the mountain to the valley. Each day we had a great sunset. Today it was really nice with the clouds in front of the Dobratsch mountain.

My mother thinks my hat is funny. Well actually a lot of people think my hat is funny. When I walked into the supermarket in search of my father all the employees of the supermarket started pointing at me and laughing. It is nice to see people smile after looking at me. And the reactions are astonishing as in China it is more normal to walk around with a funny hat, like for example a panda head hat.

For New Years Eve we had a nice dinner with my parents. Then we watched the very old classic movie “Dinner for One”. Same procedure as last year? Not for us. Then we played cards - that is like “Same procedure as yesterday”. At midnight we opened champagne and cheered. Then in Austria the radio plays the New-Years-Waltz (Kaiserwalzer) so my parents and we danced the waltz in the apartment.

The neighbors had made a snow bar and put some lights.

So we went down and watched the fireworks still drinking champagne. Our neighbor said it is much better to drink with a German physicist that opened a bike shop in Beijing than celebrating New Year with thousands of people in Berlin at the Brandenburger Gate - none of them have a bike shop in the country of the bicycles.

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30.12.2010 von Ines.

Another day of sunshine an blue sky. Perfect for skiing. Julien had switched a longer snowboard then the one he was renting yesterday.

Actually skiing here in Austria reminds me of cycling in Beijing traffic. You have to assume that anybody will do anything at any time and any place. Someone might suddenly stop in the middle of the slope. His friend might almost stop but then actually continue to ride. You might get someone at high speed coming from the side. Or a kid jumping out of the woods at high speed just in front of you. Or someone that was skiing downhill suddenly crossing the entire slope from left to right side. You have to be very aware of what is around you and anticipate even the most unlikely behaviors of other people on the slopes or close by. It is like people dodging on Beijing streets.

For lunch today we looked for a different remote spot and found something really nice. We had our food and enjoyed the sun and view.

My skis are quite old. And I did not give them to service this year. So the edges of my skis are worn out. So I have not much grip on icy slopes and most of the slopes were icy as it had rained just recently even at 2000 meters. So skiing with these skis feels like riding a fixed gear bike at high speed in traffic without a brake. You have to be extremely awake and focussed on everybody around you and anticipate any of their sudden moves.

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29.12.2010 von Ines.

We got a 6 day ski pass for the Nassfeld ski resort in the south of Austria at the border with Italy and near Slovenia. That is the biggest skiing resort in Carinthia. There were some clouds today but in general we had sunshine. How nice it is to be outdoors the whole day and doing sport! I am so happy to be here!

Compared to last time I was skiing in Austria some things changed. And that was only 2 years ago in the same resort. The average speed on the ski slopes has increased drastically. It is great as now more people are skiing at a similar speed as me. But a lot of them are not such good skiers so they cannot control their skis so well. And another part of them just does not look what is going on around them and so stupid unexpected moves on the slopes. There had been quite some accidents in the past years with head injuries so now almost everybody is wearing a helmet. And a lot of kids are required to wear a back protector to protect the spine. The helmet thing is great for the helmet industry. But I believe more people injure their knees or legs where a helmet does not really change the situation. And with the helmet I have the feeling people are more reckless. For example people suddenly just stop at random places on the slope. Or they just start skiing without checking if someone is coming down their way.

We brought our own lunch and found a spot outside of the slopes where we set up the snowboard and my skis as a bench with backrest. There was a nice view.

In the evening we had a great dinner with my parents and then we all played cards again. O-hell is quite fn with 4 people.

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7.5.2010 von Ines.

Shannon Ricky and I said we meet for an early morning road bike ride all the way up North-West to Miaofeng Mountain. We had a 5:30 am meeting point just at the famous Beijing Hotel. I had luck because I found an electric bike rider that was riding at 30 km/h that I could draft behind all the way to the meeting point. Shortly before our meeting point I noticed a road cyclist standing on the sidewalk. My first thought was “great to see Chinese people in lycra this early on a weekday”. My second thought was “was that maybe Shannon? Maybe he does not know where the Beijing Hotel is”. And then by the time I thought my 3rd thought I was almost at the meeting point. Shannon came after a while and was unhappy that I passed him without stopping to help with his flat tire. Both me and Ricky gave him our pumps. Mine is the kind where you need to turn the inside of the head around if you switch from American to French valves. Well it is probably not the best thing to do early in the morning standing right over a sewage grid. Well the obvious happened, I dropped the pump head and it nicely rolled into the slits and dropped into the sewage water.

After a long flat ride as a peloton I suddenly hit a rock a got a pinch flat. Now that my pump had no head anymore and Ricky’s wasn’t working Shannon helped me pump up the new inner tube. But with his pump he broke my inner tube valve. So I took off the new now broken tube and patched the original inner tube and put it back. Then it was not far to the foot of the Miaofengshan where we split up so that each of us could try to beat their own best time. I was already feeling quite tired so I only did the 13km uphill ride from the gate to the village.

Shannon and Richy continued the additional 6 km continuous uphill to the temple at the top. It was quite windy on the mountain and I was happy when they both came back.

As we approached Beijing city the traffic started getting worse and worse. And what I find annoying is all the cars parked and driving in the bike lane. Like here, this picture shows a pure bike lane, but it has people parked on the left and right side plus cars riding in the center. Where should the cyclists ride their bike?

Or here in this picture the white line on the left divides the car lane from the bike lane. But the cars are all jammed up and standing in the bicycle path. No cyclist can ride through this mess. So it was even worse that after today’s 130km bike ride that Shannon insisted that we try out the route for tonight’s STC ride and we had to squeeze ourselves through the city traffic jams.

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1.5.2010 von Ines.

May first is a public holiday in China. So all of China is traveling. So usually foreigners avoid this time and do not travel to a touristy place like Hangzhou. We did. And it was so great that we had bikes so that we could actually get around the green city.

We went back to the West Lake and had some breakfast there. But even on teh far side it was very busy with many Chinese people.

In many places in Hangzhou the bicycle lanes were very wide and separated from the car lanes.

But in some areas, especially close to the lake there were so many tourists that they were even on the bike lane.

Hangzhou is famous for its’ bike rental system. They have the automatic rental stations all over the city. Some were not not used so much today, like this station.

The bicycle renting system is great. You can pick up a bike at one station and then drop it off at a different station. Even young ladies in skirts were renting bikes.

And many rental stations were quite empty which means the bikes were out being rented. It is great to see this system working. Only for us as tourists we could not use this rental system as we could not buy a card. Therefore we had teh bikes of teh guest house and had to return them back to there.

As we had not planned on coming to Hangzhou we did not plan a sightseeing tour. Instead yesterday when we arrived we bought a Chinese map. In the map some streets were marked as “te se” which means special. So today our tour was not following a lonely planet route that all foreigners do, but to see what the Chinese think is special. It did remind us that we actually were foreign as some of the streets did not seem special to us. We had lunch in the special food street, but we afterwards agreed that the food in the tiny hole in the wall restaurant yesterday had been more tasty.

To avoid the masses we then decided to cycle to the Eight Diamond Fields in the mountains. It actually was fields with crop.

Then we slowly cycled back to our guest house to drop off our bikes. We were amazed about the amount of peopel on the streets around the zoo and our guest house. We had planned to take the bus to teh train station and we already had our first class train ticket back to Shanghai. But we were shocked to see theamount of people all wanting to board the same bus as us. We let the first one go off with Chinese jammed in. We did not yet know that it would take forever for the second bus to come as these were special May 1st busses. But we also checked for taxis and of course there were thousands of other people also desperately looking for empty taxis. So when finally after a long time the next bus came we had to do it teh Chinese way and just ram down the others and push us in. We wer one of the lucky 10 people that could squeeze themselves on this competely overcrowded bus. We were happy of that achievement. But then the issue was the traffic jam. We did not notice how bad all the roads were while cycling past. But the bus was hardly rolling. It took forever to reach the first station which was not far away from the zoo. I had the idea to maybe get off at one of the next stops where there woudl be less people and then try to get a taxi. But that was wishful thinking. After 1.5 hours we had still not reached the second bus stop but we knew already that we had missed our train to Shanghai But we did not want to miss our train from Shanghai to Beijing. There was no way that we would get a taxi and it would also just be standing in traffic like the bus. The people crammed on the bus themselves ssaid that it would be best to ride a bike. Even the bus driver agreed that the fastest way to get around Hangzhou is a bicycle. How wonderful! It was great to hear them have thise thoughts. At the second bus stop we got off and started walking. We knew it would be not as far as what we walked on the first day. We actually arrived at the train station much faster then I expected. We first went to the ticket hall to see if we can buy a new ticket. But as it was May 1st it was overfilled with people. It would probably take 2 hours to get to the counter and then there would probably be no more tickets and by thenwe would have missed the train to Beijing. So we decided to go to the waiting hall and see when the next fast train to Shanghai departs. It was very soon. We knew that many people today must have missed their trains, so we just lines up as if we had the correct tickets. But the lady at the ticket check detected that we have teh wrong tickets and said we have to buy new ones. We just stayed right next to her. She continued to chek the tickets while we thought our only chance is for my to look really upset and almost cry and to show her our first class tickets for the Shanghai-Beijing train that we really did not want to miss. In teh end it worked. Probably also because we had the expensive first class tickets for teh Hangzhou-Shanghai. That was a close call.

Back in Shanghai we needed to get all our bike exhibition stuff and the bike out of the storage and then run to the platform. It was again very tight but we actually made it onto the night train back to Beijing.

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30.4.2010 von Ines.

As tomorrow is the May first holiday and the beginning of the Shanghai World Expo we were not able to get a train ticket back to Beijing for this evening. So we decided that instead of staying in Shanghai it would be nicer to take a day holiday in Hangzhou. So we took the fast train to Hangzhou and stayed in a nice guest house near the zoo.

We had dinner in a small hole in the wall place with local food. It was really good and of course really cheap. As we knew tomorrow would be endless amounts of tourists we decided to take a long night walk to the famous and beautiful West Lake (Xi Hu).

We walked over one of the embankments crossing the lake. The one we took had 6 bridges and was very long. But we had a nice view of the mountains in the West of the lake.

There was hardly anybody out. It was really peaceful and quiet. This was in the direction of Hangzhou city center.

It was a beautiful night with a full moon. We walked for over 2 hours at fast pace. Back at the hostel we booked 2 bikes for the next day so that we could explore the city.

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28.3.2010 von Ines.

Finally I could join my first cyclo cross race of the 2009/2010 season in Beijing. TREK had already organized 2 cyclo cross races and this one was the last of the series for this winter.

Last season I was racing on loaner bikes from TREK. Last summer I bought the TREK entry level cyclo cross bicycle hoping for many races. But today was the first time I raced on it.

The race was organized well. There was an A group, a B group, the women and the children. The A group started first and the B and women started 1 minute afterwards. So we were all racing at the same time which made it more interesting.

The course was shorter than last season and there was only a very short part on the road, the rest was on the extremely dry (dry Beijing) and hard fields. Of course there was no mud anywhere. I am not sure it was good to be on a road bike with cyclo cross tires as it was really uneven in most parts of the lap. A suspension fork like on some of the mountain bikes would have helped to absorb the shocks. Actually most of the contestants were riding mountain bikes this year. With the barriers and the jumping on and off the bike you really feel your heart working. Half way through it started getting really tough, I felt my legs get softer and my hands having hard time to keep a firm grip with all the shaking of the bike vibrating over the corn field. It was a big relief to hear the bell for the last lap.

Jenny from Canada was fast and fit as always so she won and finished way ahead of me (2nd place). The Chinese girl that won 3rd place was actually quite fast. But unfortunately I lapped all the other girls - that means there had been more than an entire lap slower. Why are there not more fast Chinese girls participating? For the A riders our French friend Tony came in first place and Piers had a problem with his pedal so he only came in 3rd place.

The bus on the way home was stuck in massive afternoon traffic jams. I should have just ridden my bike home as that would have been much faster. But I do not know where I could have ridden my bike. In many places the cars (traffic jam) was blocking the bike lane. On the one stretch there were two car lanes in one direction and on each side a bike lane. But all 4 lanes were filled with cars.

One car that was incorrectly driving in the bike lane hit an electric bike. Instead of saying sorry the car driver got out and started hitting the electric bike rider. But he did not foresee that the electric bike rider was more fit (as he does not drive cars) and was soon in the superior position.

I just remembered when I did the test for the Chinese driver’s license in 2005 we first had to listen to a 20 minute video instructing us that any disobedience of the Chinese traffic rules and laws will be followed with punishment. They showed how they have cameras every where in the city tracking drivers that do not follow the rules. I complete forgot about that because living here you experience so many people breaking the traffic law all the time. Maybe it is just too often to actually be tracked. But I really would hope that the cars would stay out of the Beijing bicycle lanes. That would make it less dangerous.

My ankle that I twisted in Taiwan which doing some tricks on somebody’s bike is still not fully healed. But now after the race I might take the tape off.

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