Advantages of riding a bicycle in Saigon

Here are the obvious:

-Exercise

-Cheap to buy ($100 or less)

-Easy to use and cheap to maintain

Here are the not-so-obvious:

-No need to have a license (which is very tedious to obtain for a foreigner)

-No need to wear a helmet

-No need to obey the traffic laws (you can pretty much break any rule imaginable and never get a ticket)

-Cheap to park (Motorbikes cost 3K-10K to park. Bikes cost 1K or nil)

-Fast to park (Usually you can just find a space right up front)

-Easy to push (It is a bitch to push my motorbike up and down the ramp of my house. With a bike it is a breeze)

-Great for Saigon’s rush hour (A limber bike can do wonder when it comes to maneuvering between the gap of a bus and a taxi. Besides who needs a 150cc motorbike when traffic crawls at 5 miles/h)

-Great for discovering things (Often time, I notice things I normally wouldnt notice had I ridden a motorbike, like a new shop, a quaint restaurant, a vacant lot, an expression on a face or that forever elusive beautiful Saigon girl)

-But to me, the biggest reason why I love riding the bike is because I give me “me time”. On a quiet street at night, as my bike creaks along I think about shit: what happened today, my past, my future, the decisions I have made and will make and the people of my life.