The Flying Pigeon Project

Bike Garages of Japan

Japan has a reputation for building top quality cars. Despite that, car ownership is falling. This in part is due to the lack of space to park a car. Additionally all oil is imported and commensurately expensive. So who is the winner? The bicycle. Bikes are everywhere. There are so many bikes that these too run into an issue with space. Where to put them? There did not appear to be any of the Chinese style basement parking garages but we did see a few neat above ground garages...

  

..with multi-tier covered parking!!!

The Blue Phoenix of Axum

Axum, Ethiopia to be exact. Tom Furtwangler from the excellent blog Bikejuju sent me these photographs of a set of iridescent blue Phoenix roadsters he found in Axum. As mentioned before, Africa is one of the main export markets for Indian and Chinese roadster manufacturers. But enough talk. Let's look at the photos.

The first picture shows what appears to be a 26" Phoenix leaning on it's sidestand outside a cafe. It is equipped with a light and bottle dynamo, which are infrequently seen in China.

 

Japanese Bike Shops: Kon's

One of the legendary traits of Japanese culture is service...outstanding service. Still when I asked the Kyoto hotel concierge if he knew a nearby bike shop that sold Miyata or Bridgestone bikes I was a bit surprised when he spent a good 20 minutes on the phone calling around to bike shops. Like I said...Outstanding service.

The first shop he sent me too was Silbest. This was a high end race shop, and I was looking for distinctly low end roadsters. But their English was excellent and they politely took time to point me in the direction of two other bike shops...that's right,their competition... that might be able to help me. How many places would do that?

One of these shops was Kon's.

Toleka Saddle

Here is a nice little bit I picked up this weekend while perusing Beixinqiao with a new pengyou from the States. It is a Toleka Saddle. Kinda Looks like a Brooks B33 right? I thought so too, which is why I bought it. Its got all the right stuff including heavy duty double twisted springs on a three rail base. Looks nice, especially because I photographed it using a new lightbox that my wife made for me.

 

Shanghai Forever

Shanghai Forever is another one of the "Famous Four" Chinese brands, and currently the most successful. The company was founded in 1940, and was listed on the Shanghai stock exchange in 1993. They were taken over in 2001 and now manufacture all types of leisure products including mahjong tables, but of course it is the bikes we were interested in. As the name "Forever" might suggest, the bikes are intended to last a long time indeed. I was once told that there was a saying in the old Communist days:

"If you have a baby boy, get a Forever, because he will be with the family always, but if you have a baby girl, get a Flying Pigeon because she will eventually fly away."