Bicycle Tragedy

So if you watched my last video you found out I wanted to buy a bike. So… just like 3 days ago or something like that we bought bikes! We found a pair of awesome bikes for 12.000 yen each. I sooo loved my bike for the first.. 30 minutes or so.

We biked them home, parked them besides a sign that looked like this:

Which we assumed meant something like “bicycle parking to the left of this sign”, because all bikes were parked to the left of that sign and no-one to the right. We went home and when we got back out in the morning our bikes were gone. Since we during the night had been informed by the ever-so-kind-and-helpful Maho (really, I mean it, thanks Maho) that parking along the streets is illegal and that sign actually said “bicycle parking garage this way”; we assumed that our bikes had been impounded.

We went to pick up our bikes and paid the quite hefty fine of 5000 yen, so now our very good 12k yen bikes were not so good 17k yen bikes.

Upon further investigation we found out that parking along the streets is practically illegal everywhere and you have to rent a parking-spot in one of those garages that I mentioned earlier. Renting a spot in one of those garages costs 2000 yen per month, and we need to have at least two spots, one by the station or school and one at home. So now our 12k yen bikes were 17k yen + 4k yen a month bikes.

Also, the parking garage close to our home is in the wrong direction. Which just makes everything so much more inconvenient. So basically we save 4k yen by taking the train from the other station and those savings (and the very moderate convenience) has now been all but wiped out.

The only possible way we could recover our investment at this points is by biking all the way to school. Which would probably take around 20-30 minutes considering traffic. Which is not all that bad, I could consider doing it but not in this heat.

So we now have two remaining options, biking 25 minutes in 40 degree heat or selling the bikes again and recover as much as we can of our losses. Actually, there is a third alternative; somehow find long-time storage that is free or practically free so that we can start biking in 3-4 months when the heat dies down. I had a plan for this, but I’m not sure if it would work. Park the bikes on the street and get them towed away, then come pick them up and pay 5k yen in 4 months. I don’t think they store the bikes for that long though :/

Who would have thunk that owning a bike in Japan is as complicated as owning a car. I think we’ll sell the bikes…