So Tuesday after class, I hopped on my bike to head home. It was lightly raining. It wasn't enough for me to bother with a rain jacket, or to worry about it getting in my eyes too much while riding. I didn't feel like getting too worked up, since I had a lot of homework to get done that night, so I was taking it pretty easy. Also, I've been riding more cautiously in the rain here anyway; my bike's brakes are pretty remarkably ineffective when they're wet. The tires still grip the road surface just fine, but it takes several wheel revolutions of full pressure braking before enough moisture is swept off of the rims for the brakes to start applying any deceleration to the wheels.
Topographically speaking, the route home goes slightly downhill, slightly uphill, flat, slightly uphill, downhill, uphill, and then downhill to the driveway. On the second to last downhill portion, the car ahead of me slowed down and stopped--I think the car in front was making a right turn and waiting for a traffic break (in Japan cars drive on the left side of the road), but that detail is a little bit irrelevant. There was a comfortable distance between me and the car, so I started applying the brakes, not really thinking too much of anything.
After the normal period of not doing anything, though, by brakes continued to not do anything. I realized that my options had suddenly become very limited. To the left of the car was a guardrail, and not enough room to walk by, let alone ride by at 30 mph, which is what I'm realistically estimating my speed at. To the right of the car was oncoming traffic. My rear brake is never powerful enough to lock the rear wheel anyway, and the plastic pedals on the bike are too slippery to allow it, so a move like a skater's hockey stop wouldn't work at all. Again because of the pedals, trying to bail out and just jump off the bike would probably just make me fall uncontrolled and piledrive my bike into the car.
Anyone who's squeamish and has an active imagination should skip the next four paragraphs...
Having gone through that many rejected options, I was out of time and simply ran straight into the car. My front wheel hit the bumper first, and I was launched off the saddle into the vertical rear door. I'm pretty sure it was my left shoulder that put the dent in the door panel; my mouth hit the glass. As I got up I was bleeding pretty profusely. I thought it was a nasty nosebleed.
The driver moved her car out of the intersection, and I picked up my stuff and moved it off of the road. Offering me tissues to try to control the blood, she first confirmed that I had insurance before calling the police and sentencing me to medical care. While she did that, I used the car's glass to inspect the damage to myself. I didn't have a nosebleed, I had a laceration between my upper lip and my nose that was being quite productive. I guess the force of the impact tore the skin open. Also, my braces did quite a number on the inside of my upper lip. My teeth were hurting quite a bit, but they were all there, and all still in the right position.
Shortly after the police showed up, Laura and Kate, two other students in my dorm, came upon me while walking home, and started helping with the information exchange. This was fortunate, as I wasn't thinking terribly clearly at that stage, and due to the massive swelling of my upper lip, I was barely intelligible in English, let alone Japanese. An ambulance was called for, and after establishing that a Japanese-only hospital was fine, I got a one-minute ride up the last hill before getting home, to the Utano Hospital. I thought this was pretty funny, because with as long as it took for the ambulance to be called for, get there, figure out what was going on, and deliver me, I could have walked there. It was something like 100 meters from where I crashed.
I got two stitches on the laceration below my nose and one in my upper lip, with tap to hold the other parts of the cut closed. My lip, since it was shredded in a particularly wonderful fashion, was the recipient of a snip for a dangling chunk. That took a long time to stop bleeding. After the cleanup, I got a CT scan to make sure there weren't any breaks. Then the doctor dispensed some instructions, and I was free to pick up my prescriptions and go.
My total cost for the ambulance ride, ER treatment, and prescriptions was slightly less than US$60. This really makes the US health care system look like an awful joke. I can't see that kind of treatment at a US hospital being less than a four figures even after insurance, and probably over $10000 before insurance.
More good news in terms of insurance: the information reached me yesterday that the driver does have car insurance. Even though there wasn't anything I could have done about it, I am legally at fault (that's fair--she was stopped, it certainly wasn't her fault), so the damage is on my bill. But now at worst I'll have to pay an insurance deductible. The way it was phrased when I heard it, though, I don't know if there even is a deductible. I'll find out more on Monday, when I go in to the police station for paperwork regarding the insurance. That should be fun.
I'll be meeting with the driver on the 28th this month. That's when all the payment details will get fully worked out. I'll be going with at least one person from the International Center at Ritsumeikan to help with the language barrier. My main job will be to apologize. That might sound weird to most Americans, since I got stuffed into an ambulance and she didn't get hurt, but the fact is that she didn't do anything, and then suddenly she had to deal with a damaged car, talking to a big, bleeding, and probably accidentally rude gaijin, and an afternoon full of talking with police and otherwise not doing what she had planned to do.
Anyway, I'm recovering pretty well. By the next day it didn't hurt any more, and I've just been needing more rest than normal. Today the swelling is mostly gone, so I look almost normal except for the cut. It did put a noticeable dent in my studies this week, and I'm struggling to work up the motivation to get back on track with that. But, things could have gone a lot worse, and I'm glad they didn't.
Showing posts with label bikes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bikes. Show all posts
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
Mostly quiet on the Eastern Front
I've skipped a couple days' worth of posts due to school and other occurences, but this also has the effect of allowing me to make a full post. Hoorah!
Tuesday, I woke up early to go to the bank, withdraw money, and then pay my rent and class fees before the 10:30 am rent deadline. During mild rain I set out on my creaky bike. I got halfway between the first and second lights after Ninna-ji, standing and mashing the pedals as usual since the bike is too small, when suddenly the left pedal (which had more of a grinding feel anyway) starting feeling wobbly. I sat down immediately and looked down at my foot while pedaling. Within one more pedal revolution, the left crankarm of the bike fell off. Great... either the nut that holds the arm on wasn't properly torqued and I pedalled hard enough to loosen it, or it wasn't there in the first place and I finally managed to break the rust. Anyway, I got to do some extra walking, but still wound up getting everything done before the rent deadline. Although it's been established that there's nothing that happens if you don't pay on time, I wanted to get it done on time anyway.
After classes, I got the bike fixed at a nearby shop for a pittance. The bike no longer creaks with every pedal stroke. I got the third and last of my textbooks, the one for my conversation class, which brings my total textbook expense for the semester to 6210円, or about $59.14 at the current rate. After five semesters of buying textbooks for UNM, this is astounding to me.
Wednesday I had only one class session, and the weather was fantastic, so I went to Kinkaku-ji. While I didn't have the mental energy to make a blog post afterwards, I did do a pretty decent job of captioning my gallery of it. Here's a direct link to the gallery.
Anyway, I have now been to every class at least once. Out of ten 90-minute class sessions per week, one is taught in English. My language class teachers have demonstrated that they can speak English just fine, but without actually saying it they've conveyed that we should only bail out and cheat when we absolutely can't think of how to ask something in Japanese. So far the workload is low. I did one assignment during the week, and I did about half of my weekend's homework today in about an hour. This means I should be able to get a good amount of kanji study in over the weekend. For this semester's kanji, I already know 140 out of 252 of them reasonably well; over the weekend I could get to where I know all of them reasonably well, and if I review them enough I could know them all permanently by the end of the month. Because learning this amount of kanji sounds relatively easy to me, I'm going to up the ante and study the B class's kanji as well. I think it's worth the effort for me to try to bump up to A next semester instead of going to B like normal.
In other news, today, I got a friendly simultaneous reminder that it's good to be in Japan, and that it's also still a good idea to pay attention instead of being a retard. After my classes and buying a composition notebook for the weekend's homework, I noticed my keys were not in my pocket. After a moment of panic, I decided the most likely cause of this was that I left my keys sitting in the bike lock. I got to my bike, and sure enough, it was there, locked, with the key sitting in the lock, untouched. I wouldn't ever expect to see my bike again if I did that at UNM, but then, at UNM they don't have multiple bike parking lots like this:
The second floor.
The first floor.
A constant line of people going in to the 2nd floor - the first floor is closed and full. Since my shot of the first floor has an admittedly crappy exposure, to put this into proper perspective, there's parking room for approximately 6000 bikes on the first floor alone. There's another bike lot the same size as this one at the south gate, and a 2nd-floor-only lot that's not quite as big at the north gate. There are lot attendants almost always on duty making sure that the bikes are packed in nice and tight. The traffic, the attendants, and the fact that it's Japan probably all deserve credit for my bike still being there.
Admittedly, if my bike had vanished, I wouldn't have been terribly upset. But, I would have been disgruntled that my room key and helmet were gone. It would cost me at least 50% more to replace the helmet than to buy another bike of that caliber.
Tuesday, I woke up early to go to the bank, withdraw money, and then pay my rent and class fees before the 10:30 am rent deadline. During mild rain I set out on my creaky bike. I got halfway between the first and second lights after Ninna-ji, standing and mashing the pedals as usual since the bike is too small, when suddenly the left pedal (which had more of a grinding feel anyway) starting feeling wobbly. I sat down immediately and looked down at my foot while pedaling. Within one more pedal revolution, the left crankarm of the bike fell off. Great... either the nut that holds the arm on wasn't properly torqued and I pedalled hard enough to loosen it, or it wasn't there in the first place and I finally managed to break the rust. Anyway, I got to do some extra walking, but still wound up getting everything done before the rent deadline. Although it's been established that there's nothing that happens if you don't pay on time, I wanted to get it done on time anyway.
After classes, I got the bike fixed at a nearby shop for a pittance. The bike no longer creaks with every pedal stroke. I got the third and last of my textbooks, the one for my conversation class, which brings my total textbook expense for the semester to 6210円, or about $59.14 at the current rate. After five semesters of buying textbooks for UNM, this is astounding to me.
Wednesday I had only one class session, and the weather was fantastic, so I went to Kinkaku-ji. While I didn't have the mental energy to make a blog post afterwards, I did do a pretty decent job of captioning my gallery of it. Here's a direct link to the gallery.
Anyway, I have now been to every class at least once. Out of ten 90-minute class sessions per week, one is taught in English. My language class teachers have demonstrated that they can speak English just fine, but without actually saying it they've conveyed that we should only bail out and cheat when we absolutely can't think of how to ask something in Japanese. So far the workload is low. I did one assignment during the week, and I did about half of my weekend's homework today in about an hour. This means I should be able to get a good amount of kanji study in over the weekend. For this semester's kanji, I already know 140 out of 252 of them reasonably well; over the weekend I could get to where I know all of them reasonably well, and if I review them enough I could know them all permanently by the end of the month. Because learning this amount of kanji sounds relatively easy to me, I'm going to up the ante and study the B class's kanji as well. I think it's worth the effort for me to try to bump up to A next semester instead of going to B like normal.
In other news, today, I got a friendly simultaneous reminder that it's good to be in Japan, and that it's also still a good idea to pay attention instead of being a retard. After my classes and buying a composition notebook for the weekend's homework, I noticed my keys were not in my pocket. After a moment of panic, I decided the most likely cause of this was that I left my keys sitting in the bike lock. I got to my bike, and sure enough, it was there, locked, with the key sitting in the lock, untouched. I wouldn't ever expect to see my bike again if I did that at UNM, but then, at UNM they don't have multiple bike parking lots like this:
The second floor.
The first floor.
A constant line of people going in to the 2nd floor - the first floor is closed and full. Since my shot of the first floor has an admittedly crappy exposure, to put this into proper perspective, there's parking room for approximately 6000 bikes on the first floor alone. There's another bike lot the same size as this one at the south gate, and a 2nd-floor-only lot that's not quite as big at the north gate. There are lot attendants almost always on duty making sure that the bikes are packed in nice and tight. The traffic, the attendants, and the fact that it's Japan probably all deserve credit for my bike still being there.Admittedly, if my bike had vanished, I wouldn't have been terribly upset. But, I would have been disgruntled that my room key and helmet were gone. It would cost me at least 50% more to replace the helmet than to buy another bike of that caliber.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Bike hunting
Today I went out for a bit to see if I could find a bike that's the right size for me. While I appreciate my freebie bike, it is about six sizes too small for me. As comical as it looks, it's not too much fun to use, and it's unbalanced enough that quick manoeuvres are pretty difficult to pull off. Plus it's got some mechanical issues. I didn't have any intention of buying today. I just wanted to see what my options are.
So far, I have yet to find any options. I asked to see the biggest bikes in two stores, and while they were better than the one I've got, they were still very small for me. After paying attention to what brands the stores had, I came home and checked on their websites to see what the biggest sizes I can order are. The longest top tube I could find on a bike is between the lengths of an XS and a Small of the mountain bike I've got; I ride a large.
The bikes I've found that I can get in the right size are all being imported from the US (despite being made in Taiwan for the most part), and are priced around $200 higher than what they're worth. Generally speaking, they're at minimum almost the same cost as it would be to ship my bike over and mostly a lot higher, and I already know that one fits me.
It might take a while to figure this one out.
So far, I have yet to find any options. I asked to see the biggest bikes in two stores, and while they were better than the one I've got, they were still very small for me. After paying attention to what brands the stores had, I came home and checked on their websites to see what the biggest sizes I can order are. The longest top tube I could find on a bike is between the lengths of an XS and a Small of the mountain bike I've got; I ride a large.
The bikes I've found that I can get in the right size are all being imported from the US (despite being made in Taiwan for the most part), and are priced around $200 higher than what they're worth. Generally speaking, they're at minimum almost the same cost as it would be to ship my bike over and mostly a lot higher, and I already know that one fits me.
It might take a while to figure this one out.
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