I eventually got around to registering myself on the Mobike app so that I could whizz along the streets like the other cool dudes on my orange wheels. I had to take a photo of my passport and then a selfie of me holding same passport and then pay a deposit using Wechat and then some credit for the use of the bike.
Today I decided to walk into town and then get a Mobike back. However I ended up buying a lot of heavily discounted food in Marks and Spencer and then I was burdened down with jars and bottles and tins. Nevertheless I had run out of reading material so it was either a long walk to Fuzhou Lu with two heavy bags or a little Mobike.
And I mean little. My God who did they use as a model for these things? Surely Chinese are not this small. The lack of a basket meant I had to hang my shopping off the handlebars so that my knees hit the tins and jars and bottle with every rotation. But I persevered, I wanted to get my money’s worth after all.
33 mins later, after much road crossing, pushing the bike along the pavement and navigating parked cars and rushing silent e.bike I arrived at the Foreign Language Bookstore. What I do like about the Mobike is the fact that you can abandon them anywhere you like. You don’t have to find a bicycle rack. So I left it outside the shop and after having spent a good half hour, I exited to find someone else had hopped on it. Fair enough. 
I had a bit of a walk to find another one and although it wasn’t much fun carrying all my Marks and Spencers shopping plus a book, I was pleased to stumble upon the Muslim area of Shanghai. Here were all manner of Islamic food, halal meat hanging from hooks, flat breads in naan ovens, all run by women in headscarves and men in typical Muslim hats. I paid 5rmb for a delicious deep fried round eggy bread type of thing which had a salty and sweet after taste. It was fantastic and I was starving. So I cycled on, taking bites of my eggy bread in one hand and the other steering my Mobike and my knees getting bruised from all the contact with the Red Thai Curry Sauces in my shopping bag.
I gave up the bike at the elevated road – definitely too difficult to navigate that on a regular bike let alone a Mobike. I had planned to get another bike on the other side of the footbridge on HuaiHai Lu but when I reached for my phone it was out of juice. And that’s the problem – no phone no bike. So I walked home with my ever increasingly stretched arms and aching back… the price I have to pay for picking up food just about to go past its sell-by date.
Mobikes are definitely not made for foreigners but they are handy, not least because it tells you have far you have gone, how long it took and how many calories you burnt. It doesn’t tell you how many of the Chinese govt employees are monitoring your every move though.
Call me paranoid but everything I do requires my passport, from buying a SIM card, a train ticket, renting a house, renting a bicycle and posting a parcel. Now I am a big user of Wechat wallet, they know not only where I have been, how long it took me to get there, but where I had lunch, what I ate and how much I spent on it. They know what kind of coffee I like in Starbucks, who my friends are on Wechat and what I say to them and now they know how good I am am cycling! I guess you wouldn’t live here if you cared too much about your privacy!