"He says there are a few areas where foreigners aren’t allowed, such as around military sites, 'but you normally just get politely turned out.' Overall, 'people are extremely helpful and nice to people on bikes here.'"
Says the Washington Post, in "What it’s like to solo cycle through rural China/Three cyclists share their stories."
The most-liked comment over there fixates on the 4th sentence of the article: "Now 40, Rosenberg has a collection of tattoos joining the scars she incurred at 20 years old when a swimming pool explosion shattered her leg."
The commenter says: "Wait, what? Swimming pool explosion? You can’t just gloss over that."
Others: "That's exactly what I said!"/"Maybe a chlorinator mixing incident?? I’m also curious!"/"Yeah I saw that in your other comment. I want know the story in this specific case."
There's a link to an article at the National Library of Medicine: "Explosion risk from swimming pool chlorinators and review of chlorine toxicity."
FROM THE EMAIL: DanTheMan writes: "The author doesn’t mention that Chinese GPS is purposely distorted, and thus it would be rather hazardous to rely on your phone for navigation. It's s like the old Soviet Union, where accurate city maps were considered state secrets." He links to this:
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1 comment:
Ted writes:
I was curious about Marian Rosenberg, so I looked her up online. She's apparently a highly accomplished translator, cyclist, tour guide, and overall a remarkable person. And she's documented a lot of her travels on cycling sites.
Here's what she had to say about her pool accident. (I've put that in boldface, and also copied part of the rest of the post -- which describes how she eventually became a cyclist in China.)
https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/huandao2006/and-why-im-doing-this/m.
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On June 11, 2000, I broke my leg in a freak swimming pool explosion. Really, I did. I know the words "swimming pool" and "explosion" aren't usually associated with one another but that's how I was injured. I was working as a lifeguard and something went catastrophically wrong in the pump house. Unfortunately, the boom bits happened as I was walking in to investigate the funny smell.
Compound complex open fracture of the right tibia; Spiral fracture of the right fibula; A really chewed up right arm (that perfectly matched the shadow of completely undamaged skin on my face), well you get the picture...while I was at it I also inhaled some chlorine and did nasty stuff to my lungs.
In the aftermath of the accident I went from being the kind of person who swims a mile or two a day to the kind of person who sometimes goes up as many as three flights of stairs a day. The metabolism takes a while to adjust to reduced activity levels. I didn't merely put on weight. I ballooned. I think I topped out at 250 pounds (from 186) before my weight started dropping again.
I went back to university.
I learned to walk again.
I graduated university.
I got pretty good at that walking thing.
And my friend Mike decided riding a bike would be good for me.
So he reached into his collection (which, while not containing anything especially fabulous is impressively large), got out a bike that could be adjusted to fit me, adjusted it, put air in the tires and sent me toddling off down a low traffic dead end rural road while he and another friend went to work on fixing motorcycles.
Oh, what fun! What incredible fun! In the two, or very possibly three, kilometers I did that day I saw squirrels, I saw a deer, I saw a bunch of really pretty houses. It's a good thing I had such a fabulous time because the next day even using narcotics for the pain wasn't enough to coax me very far out of bed.
A little more than a year later, about a month after I moved to China, I decided to buy a bicycle....
P.S.: If the Washington Post had just said "a swimming-pool pump house explosion," they would have avoided all the confusion.
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