Visit to Tokyo’s Blue Rug, “The Best Bicycle Shop in the World”
Certainly you can spend hours on the website. Japanese and English versionsthe shop’s social media channels. Very active on blue rugs Facebook, Instagramand Flickr The account, the latter, spans over 1,391 pages, with over 139,000 photos. There is also a whole set YouTube videos A bicycle assembled into a completed custom build from a naked frame. Videos tend to be wordsless and seductive, following their process as a skilled mechanic. Most are over 20 minutes, one is a 44 min crust buildGet custom paint jobs and dreamy soundtracks.
The video has a soothing ASMR quality, and you can learn a lot just by watching it. Even if you’re not that careful, a comfortable 30 minutes may escape.
What Blue Rug creates tend to be pieces of beauty that sits in the bond between fun, fashion and practicality.
“They put together the bikes in ways no one else thinks about them. They pay attention to the details,” Keating says before detouring a bit of a solo microcraze that the shop has created between bikes, like cable hangers and top tube protectors.
With the help of the shop staff, I ride in town, renting a bike from one of the tallest employees of Blue Rug, one of the Kaisei tribes. Bicycle is 2 years old Space horses of all cities It’s a beautiful blue colour I’ve never seen before, Nice fat tiresand a crisp dial-in shift.
I begin picking my small neighborhood and visit them and navigate my path. This is a bit fun, but you’re trying to pull out the map and find a way to get from one place to another. It’s doable but noisy. But I stop navigating and riding. The men in the shop recommend visiting Yoyogi Park. This turns out to have a dedicated cycling pass with English signs that say “just have fun.”
After a very fun croquette sandwich from the park food truck, I go back to my bike, throw away the map, turn myself in the general direction “to the water” and just ride. It’s surprisingly cold. In Seattle, the tongue on the cheek, the driver says it rings out quickly. Jokes, they tend to assume road rights. It leaves you on the edge. In Tokyo, things felt more integrated and equal. No one will ring. Simply following people and riding the other side will be surprisingly easy. It’s so much about getting into the flow, and often a cyclist leads ahead of you.
Considering that I was riding a new bike for me, a new town on the side of a new road for me, it was exhilarating and created a new way of connecting with the city. You really don’t want to tear it often. When you ride through Tokyo on the perfect bike, you enjoy the flow state.
