nihon no jitensha

Even though Japan as a developed country is so advanced, a lot of the people in Niigata still travel by bicycles. This is by no means a very good way to conserve energy and protect the environment, but I was quite surprised that the bicycles that they use are very ordinary ones. Nothing canggih manggih or techy about them. They actually remind me of those big old black ones that people used back in our grandparents’ days.



Last weekend, we took the train down to the Niigata city. Just like how Malaysians park their cars at the LRT station, the Japanese park their bicycles at the station. I wonder how they manage to find their bikes in the midst of all the similar looking ones. Most of them look so plain and simple there’s really nothing much to set one’s bike from the rest.



We even saw a baby stroller “parked” together with the bicycles. At first we thought someone dumped it there. What if it rained? What if it was taken away? The stroller was not locked like how most of the bikes were.



Just as we were wondering aloud, a woman came from the station with her baby and promptly put her daughter into the stroller and pushed it away down the road. Imagine that, parking your stroller as if it was a car and leaving it in the open air. Only in Japan, eh?