Not a "mama-chari"

Note: This silver mama-chari was not mine... just a random picture posted by some happy owner.

If you have lived in Japan, you probably know what a mama-chari is. It is one of those upright bikes designed so that you can ride it a skirt of any length with relative ease. They are primarily black... although in Taiwan, you can get them in pink and lavendar as well (see the Valentine's Day sale pages of any discount store)! They have a bell attached to the right handlebar and a big basket in front. They often also have spokes protruding from the centers of the back wheel for people to stand on when the owner wants to take on "passengers". If there are no spokes, that is probably because the bike is already equipt with a "rat trap" over the back wheel for other ladies in skirts to sit on. (If you have a choice, go for the rat trap... I once caught my skirt on the spokes and it ripped to shreds before I could stop the bike. It was a pretty embarrassing ride home.)

I used to enjoy passengering my dignified friend from Shanghai around Yokohama in this fashion. I went everywhere by mama chari: Yokohama station, work, home, to the bars, grocery shopping... etc.  Everyone use to warn me that bicycles in Japan are like umbrellas- interchangeable and pretty much the only item you own likely to be stolen (aside from underwear - DO not hang your pretty skivies out to dry). However, in all my 3 years, I never had my bike stolen. I guess I never left it outside a bar after last call.

Anyway, the title of this entry is "NOT a mama-chari". That is because the last FIVE bikes I owned have NOT been mama-charis and all of them were stolen: 3 from various places in Korea... and 2 from MY HOME in Taiwan... and YES they were locked!

I would like to take a little space on this page to apologize to those bikes for not being even MORE careful. Perhaps I should have carried them up to the warm dry haven of my apartment every day instead of leaving them outside to be rained on and rust. Two of five had titanium frames precisely to allow me to do that. The second to last one was a heavy steel job, but that one survived being repeatedly driven over by a motor-scooter (someone must have been having a bad day)... and one crash.

I love having a bike. And by the way, almost ALL BIKES COME FROM TAIWAN. Hence, you can buy almost any kind of mountain bike here and go cycling in the less polluted mountaineous outskirts of the smoggy basin that is Taipei on weekends. So maybe you can understand why I feel conflicted...  Is the trick to buy a mama-chari that no one else would want... or actually just to really carry a better, lighter bike up 4 flights of stairs every night? Or should I just give up on bicycles the way I have had to give up on watches? I won't even tell you how many of those I have lost in the past year.