By: rosie

Jul 16 2009

Category: Uncategorized

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(The White Moon Horse in front of the flat)

Well, now you know the name of the bike – in Chinese it is nicer; ‘taiyin ma’;

               太阴马

 

 

The first two characters, ‘tai yin’, make up an ancient word for moon, but contained within the word is whiteness and femininity.  The ‘ma’ at the end means horse.  I suppose the best way to say it in English would be ‘Celestial Horse’ to make it sound more ethereal and special!  There were some nice suggestions, but the bike feels powerful and swift like a horse, a theme suggested by Ying’s dad and my mother.  She offered ‘Pegasus’, the mythical winged horse of Greek legend.  I like the theme, but I wanted it to be more personal.  Ying’s mum suggested the moon as a kind of alien, strange world theme too and I decided to put them together.  I must also thank her for helping me find the correct characters – when I looked in a dictionary, there are over 60 characters relating to the moon!

What you can see in the picture is my new helmet – safety first, mum!  We bought it from the lovely lady that helped us buy both bikes.  Ying has the man’s version of this bike in Silver, which he would be more thrilled with if it went faster than this horse!  I look like a spaceman in the helmet, especially with the visor down, but I feel less likely to sustain horrific injuries with altercations with other bikes and cars.  In the background you can perhaps conceive how bizarre our garden is – with an Aztec-esque fountain just outside our front door.  I took the photo here as I’ve never seen this fountain working before.  Hopefully there will be some action shots of both bikes soon!

I’ll apologise in advance; I will probably not put up another post until Monday morning (GMT) as this weekend, Ying and I are meeting one of his old friends in Shanghai.  The up-side is that when it comes, it should be really fun, with pictures of the big city.  I’m excited, we leave tonight!