Finding actual beerbike builders

Just before the close of 2008 I have made some steady progress on the beerbike. After having received some more drawings from baba's side I decided to take him out for dinner. We met up in the French cafe and under the enjoyment of a beer (how else while building a beerbike!?) we discussed the newest drawings and the problems that still had to be solved. Three problems seemed most prevalent:

1) we need to find a place that can custom build a special sprocket that we need, all the other parts can be sourced from the car parts shop we went to some weeks ago.
2) we need to find an actual building site; a place where we can gather all the parts and assemble/build the bike at
3) The legal aspect; does the traffic police allow us to drive this bike on the Chinese public roads?

After this constructive beer sipping we went to the popular hong dou yuan (红豆园 = red bean garden) restaurant. On baba's initiative we ended up drinking bai jiu (白酒). The preferred drink for many Chinese. Just to give you an indication of what bai jiu is imagine a badly artifically flavoured vodka! However, I have to admit that the one baba picked that night was actually not so bad. With this feast of food and bai jiu our 'meeting' ended.

Some days later I phoned up Henk, a fellow Dutchie who works in the flower industry here. He had mentioned to me before that he sometimes get custom made metal parts from a school in the south of Kunming. He got me in touch with his contact Mr. Lilai. After many phone calls trying to organise a meeting between him, me and baba we managed to fix a 'date' for the day after.

The next day at 9am we met up and jumped in a cab to go to the South (of Kunming). This, as expected, confirmed Kunming's status as one of the most congested cities in China. Especially around one brigde Chinese drivers showed us the 'best' of their traffic insight by piling up 3 rows thick as dense as possible e in front of a bridge with only a one lane passageway! Hooray. In the end it took us 1h and 20min to drive 20km resulting in a 60kuai cap fee (about 7EUR). Even a beerbike would have been faster here.

At the school we were introduced to two of his colleagues, who's names i never really got as they were of the standard Chinese complication that my mind seems to reject at any time, who supposedly should be able to help us make the part we needed. One of them an eternally smiling elderly man while the other was the more serious laoban (老板 = boss) kind of type.
Seated down in their office we (mainly baba) explained what our bike project was all about and slowly they got excited. The serious laoban one even showed us his first little smiles.

After about an hour they, logically, wanted to go for lunch with their new laowai friend (老外 = foreigner) and baba and me were directed to a minority restaurant around the corner where huge amounts of food where washed down with baijiu. 'Yum'.

Once again i became aware of the fact that drinking faster doesn't mean your done faster with this traditional Chinese drink. It just means your glass gets filled up faster. I got a bit tipsy but in a nice way. Talks in no way covered anything regarding the beerbike anymore but somehow I had expected this.

Having finished we went back to the school where they showed us the machine hall that the students get taught in.

Back in their office we continued drinking tea and discussing some bike stuff again. Notes were made and phone numbers exchanged and a plan just seemed to flow out of all this eating, drinking and talking. They even announced that they would be capable of building the entire bike. In the next couple of days a price calculation would be prepared by them and I would have to go to the traffic police management bureau to check if it actually would be legal to drive such a big unmotorized vehicle on the Chinese roads. Emphasizing on this several times this clearly was a big concern for them. The three teachers were convinced the police would tell me it to be illegal driving this bike within the city limits. A bit similar to the restrictions on sanlunche (三轮车 = tricycle) bikes during daytime. I don't worry about that cause with Chinese traffic i wouldn't want to come within the city limits during daytime anyway.

To avoid another 60kuai cab ride we had to wait 1h for the school shuttle bus. Me and Lilai played some pingpong while baba retained to smoking some cigarettes and simply looking like a cool and classy 69 year old Chinese man.
At 4:30h i was dropped off in the city limits and walked to French cafe where I had a coffee and tried to study/read/decipher some pages of, the Tibet Code (藏地密码), the Chinese book I am reading at the moment. After that dinner with Annelies and here mum and thomas and laura at Manna whereafter I had a chat with Eoin and Matthew about the beerbike and cycling in general.
At 11pm I called it a day and went home after what seemed to me a really productive day.