★bike stealer

"you will experience a lot of things." Pat said to me. And then, I experienced the bike stealer here.

Last night,exactly it was about five o'clock this morning, I was still in bed and suddenly heard Aula (Pat's dog) barking. In the morning, Pat told me that one of their bikes was stolen. Pat and Larry talked with neighbor and figured out what had happened. It proved that a thief had come and stole a bike locked outside the window.

"Don't you call the police?" I asked.

"No, usually they will do nothing."

Just sound like the policemen in Beijing. I told Pat and Larry that I have lost more than three bikes in Beijing. Larry told me that this kind of stealers often were teenagers and they would not be punished if be caught. Pat told me the stolen bike cost about three (or five?) hundred dollars. So it's not a small loss.

"Bike was stolen, car window was smashed, when these kinds of things happened to you, the policemen usually did nothing to help you." Pat complained.

★number: accurate or dull?

I wonder why the thief came to steal bike last night, why he chose Pat's home. Yesterday Grainne just invited me to ride bicycle from Probe's office to lake shore this afternoon. Fortunately, Pat has another bicycle and she lend me to use.

She gave me a footpump to pump the tyres of the bicycle. She read the explanation on the pack of the pump and told me to pump the tyre untill the air pressure inside came up between 55 pounds to 75 pounds.

Pat is a lovely kind sentimental lady, she doesn't have a good sense of direction as a lot of Chinese women, but now I find the difference. A Chinese will not pump bike's tyres according to the air pressure, I believe. We estimate the air pressure inside with our hands. But even if she was a sentimental housewife who work in kitchen, the western people like to do a lot of things according to accurate number. To some extent, their lives seem based on numbers.

I can give you more examples. That's really interesting.