Riding a bike and wandering by the sea
In 18 years, my mother went to the University of California as a visiting scholar, so I suspended for one year in domestic schools and lived in the United States with my mother for one year.
At that time, I lived in a small town in the East Bay of San Francisco Bay.
I rented a one bedroom apartment in a dilapidated apartment.
I slept in the living room.
Although the apartment was broken, it was not cheap for ordinary people who made money in China and spent money in the United States.
At the exchange rate at that time, it was almost 14000 yuan a month.
This led us to live frugally.
At that time, many of our daily things were second-hand goods.
The picture is taken in the corridor of the apartment.
There is no furniture in the room.
The tables and chairs are second-hand goods.
The chairs at the dining table are still made up of two beach chairs.
But when the sun hits the beach chair through the blinds, it’s actually very beautiful.
In the house, beach chairs are used as chairs.
Some are purchased from goodwill second-hand stores, and more are collected from other Chinese visiting scholars.
When there was a light blue bike, it was mine.
It seems to me that it took forty dollars to get it from a visiting scholar.
The car was broken because it was really broken.
The brake was not easy to use.
The front brake was so hard that it was like pinching a steel fork.
It couldn’t be pinched.
After many years, it’s like a broken pocket.
The car also has a broken pedal.
When you pedal hard, the pedal will fall down with the crank.
When I bought this broken bicycle, I also brought a broken U-shaped lock.
If I didn’t use it for two days, I had to pour some oil into it to open it.
The bike in the picture is mine (the road sign wasn’t knocked down by me) because I don’t plan to graduate from the local high school, so I only chose the least classes, probably only two or three classes a day.
Every day is a free day.
At that time, I lived not far from the sea.
I could see the sea by crossing a bridge on highway 580, which could be pushed up by bike.
In my impression, I often learn to ride to the seaside to blow the sea breeze with two Chinese classmates.
We rode along baytrail from Albany to Richmond, and then stopped at Marina Bay.
Marina Bay is a harbor where many small boats stop, and there are passenger ships to San Francisco every day.
At that time, I thought about when to sit once, but I didn’t do it once when I returned home.
This picture is taken in that small harbor.
The small sailboat is along the baytrail of the sea.
In fact, it is more than this short section.
If you want to ride, you can ride all the way south to SanJose and mountain view, that is, Silicon Valley.
But I can’t stand such a long toss, so I haven’t ridden like this.
Riding on this road, the sea breeze blows from the West.
It is very windy and humid.
During the rainy season, there are a lot of fennel with yellow flowers on the roadside.
In the dry season, it will be withered and yellow.
Only the short wild meat on the roadside can live.
In fact, several classmates and I don’t have so many common topics to talk about.
We always talk about a few topics back and forth when riding on this road every day.
But I still enjoy riding on the beach.
When we get to the small bay of Richmond, we will stand on the side of the wharf, watch the small sailboat drive in, watch the parked ship, float up and down with the sea, and stand until the sun is going down.
At that time, I often locked my car here and wandered around the dock.
The small town I lived in at that time was called Albany.
In the north of Berkeley, where the University of California Berkeley is located, the city is actually very small, and the resident population seems to be more than 10000.
Except for the sound of Bart train passing, it is quiet most of the time.
Unfortunately, outside my apartment is the viaduct of Bart.
The BART MRT system in the bay area was built in the 1960s and 1970s.
The train runs with a roar.
When it arrives at the station, the sound of braking is like that of a pig under a butcher’s knife.
The apartment I live in is very close to the station in El cerriro Plaza.
I can almost hear that sound every half an hour.
At the beginning, the night train always woke me up.
However, from the window in front of my desk, I can see the trains coming from south to north.
When I was sitting at my desk cleaning my UV mirror, I rushed into the train.
Northern California has a Mediterranean climate.
It always rains in the winter half year, so I can’t always go out to ride a bike.
If it rains, I’ll lie in bed when I come back from school.
In the living room of that small apartment, there is an exhaust fan that goes straight to the roof.
When it rains, the rain crackles on the exhaust fan, making the only sound in the room.
The rainy afternoon is very gloomy.
At this time, if my mother doesn’t come back, I won’t turn on the light alone and read in bed.
Because I usually don’t take pictures on rainy days, so I can’t find a suitable one, so I use this one instead.
I remember that I like watching Wang Xiaobo, and Wang Xiaobo likes Calvino, so I also read Calvino’s book, “our ancestors” and so on.
I’ve read a lot of Wang Xiaobo’s books, including the golden age, the silver age, the red whisk running at night, looking for unparalleled, Wanshou temple, fleeting years, green hair water monster and many other essays.
After all, I can’t stand that the protagonist of every book is Wang Er.
Every Wang Er also has a penis that will hang upside down when walking in the sky.
(I don’t want to be vulgar, this is Wang Xiaobo’s original words) but it’s not easy to buy Chinese books in the United States, so I mostly read pirated photocopies on the Internet..
