Touch Cycle Base

Three things learnt in a bike shop on the weekend:

The word for ball-bearing, in Japanese, is 玉軸受け (tamajikuuke) or, just to make it a little easier, ボールベアリング (boorubearingu.) It is not however, kintama, a composition of the words for gold and ball, which it turns out actually means testicles. So telling a staff member that, “there is no oil on the inside and the testicles are missing” is liable to win you a look that could be best described as scathing.
That a company has somehow managed to convince the Japanese populace that buying an expensive replica of the clunky ten-tonne, single speed, grandma bikes that everyone rides in Shanghai is a fashionable and hip thing to do. That I totally bought into this and very seriously considered buying one to take home to Australia with me. They had leather grandma seats and Shanghai written on the hubs and were beautiful in that purely utilitarian sense that China has perfected and I want one so badly it burns inside.
That this vanity thing starts young.