After school I dragged Lee and my own reluctant self out for a bike ride. It's sometimes hard to be motivated after a long day to go be active but sometimes you just have to. Mondays and Wednesdays are now our regular yoga nights but our instructor had to do something this week so we had time on our hands.

Our plan was to bike out to a lake on the eastern side of the city, an area we haven't been to yet. The traffic was really building by then and it was crazy on the roads. We often use the bike path so we can avoid the mayhem but it gets a bit boring after awhile. This ride was anything but boring. Weaving in and out of the hordes of scooters, navigating through streets we've never been on before, watching the sun set over Monkey Mountain.

We didn't actually find the lake but I felt like it was really close. We decided to head back and make another trip out that way over the weekend since it was beginning to get dark. I don't really mind biking at night but sometimes there's only so much I feel like tempting fate.

We've gotten familiar enough with the city to be able to navigate by dead-reckoning so we came back by just heading in the direction we knew we had to go and biking until we found a familiar spot. Fortunately most of the main roads have pinyin on the street signs, not just Chinese characters. The pinyin isn't always consistent (Quichang Road at one end, Chician Road at the other) but I'm starting to see the pattern in most of the inconsistencies.

When we first arrived I couldn't imagine that I'd ever be able to learn the street names. They sounded so similar and unfamiliar - Nanping, Mingcheng, Huarong, Junghua. Now those are as familiar as Hopmeadow and Bushy Hill and every day I add more streets to the map in my head.