Stinging knees
It’s pouring with rain now in Osaka. It’s about 11pm, Wednesday, and I guess it must have started around 6pm. It’s nice to have a torrential downpour after so many days of relentless heat.
It’s also cool and exciting to ride home in heavy rain. The trade-off of course is that some surfaces become incredibly slippery; not that I didn’t know, but the slipperiness far exceeded my expectations.
The Japanese have a thing for tiles. While pavements and boulevards in my home town are either slabs of concrete or red brick, paths in Japan tend to be tiled. So many apartment buildings are tiled too. The amount of tile has to be seen to be believed (actually, I just remembered, I even went to a tile museum earlier this year! It was actually very interesting).
Anyway, the tiles, as you can imagine, get pretty slippery, and I ended up having my first crash of the year. Luckily I was moving at pretty low speed, and all I was doing was turning while going down a slight incline and BANG! I hit the ground. My left elbow and knee were scraped on the footpath as I slid along, but I was OK. Now however, my knee stings like hell, and my elbow has started to swell.
Hope I can still ride tomorrow.