Biking on the Back of a Bike

By Carly

     This weekend I had a very unusual experience!  My Uncle, E-Pie, and my family went biking on U-Bikes, or city bikes.  They are bikes with a comfortable seat and no cross bar.  Also, on the back wheel, there is a big plastic cover with a picture of a cat with one blue ear.  That’s the part of the bike that I ended up riding on!  This is why.  

     E-Pie needed to set up a U-Bike account so he could rent a bike for the day but, in order to do that, you need a Taiwanese phone number and he lives in Hong Kong, so he didn’t have one.  But, he needed a passport to get a phone number and he didn’t have his passport so he couldn’t rent a U-Bike!  The result was me sitting on the yellow wheel cover on the back of my dad’s U-bike.  We started biking but we had to stop because my butt was hurting so we folded up my mom’s sweatshirt and I sat on the sweatshirt which was on the wheel cover on the back wheel on my Dad’s bike.  It felt weird and uncomfortable but I must admit, it was pretty cool.

Me on the back of my Dad's bike

     We biked on little alley-ways and tiny streets, with me clinging onto my Dad’s back.  We had just come out of a back alley when we saw a tall structure of giant colored blocks.  We parked our bikes and walked over to it to take a look.  Unfortunately, E-Pie read the Chinese characters and they said that you can’t climb on it.  Darn!  We figured out that it was called the Vertical Village.

The sculpture outside the Vertical Village Museum

Daddy on his UBike in front of the vertical Village

     After looking at that awesome structure, we started biking again down more tiny streets and roads until we got off our bikes because we had biked into to the center of a big, crowded street market.  We walked our bikes along fruit stands, roasted duck stands, fried chicken stands, and something that looked like an outdoor spa.  People were sitting on a wall in the market while having their toenails cut way too short with scissors.  They were mostly older people that had gross, yellow, short and jagged toenails.  Some “Spa” that was!

     Finally, we jumped back onto our bikes and all of a sudden…”OUCH!!!”  “What? Why has my bike stopped?”  My dad asked.  Then he realized that my foot was stuck in between the wheel and the wheel cover!  The bad thing was that we were crossing a street and we had to get across before the walk sign turned into a stop sign!  After I pulled my foot out, we had to take my Mom’s sweatshirt off of the wheel cover before we started to bike again because I was slipping off of it.  About 20 minutes after that we got to the river which was our destination.  At the river, I got onto the U-Bike E-pie had been riding and E-pie rented a bike from a bike shop that did not require a passport. Finally we all had bikes and started biking home.