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Yesterday was one of those days, blog-worthy days. I had planned to go bike shopping with Bogdan several days in advance, so I went to his place and picked him up around 10:45 am. The plan was to have a look at some bike stores and pick out a few bikes, primarily for Myself and Costi.
The first thing we found out soon after setting off was that First Bike doesn't really sell bikes anymore. They had a shop full of ATVs, scooters and motorcycles and only 10-12 bikes forgotten hanging on a wall.
Next we thought we'd try a couple of shops from the bike shop list I found on Bike XCS. A big thanks to Alex and the rest of the guys on the Bike XCS forum for putting together the list.
We went to the AS Sport shop in Pantelimon where Bogdan fell in love with a 9700 RON mountain bike named Fritzz. We got to see a bit of what the cyclist community looks like in several places, including Bebe's shop near Piata Dorobanti, online at www.xbikers.ro. It's a real urban underground culture.
After a bit of lunch we went to see a couple more shops on Ion Mihalache Bvd. To cut the story short(er) we were either finding cheap low-quality bikes or very expensive, very high quality stuff.
After 8 1/2 hours of shopping we ended up buying 2 bikes from Carrefour for around 900 RON each and one bike from the ending stocks of one First Bike store for 500 RON. As I had a true expert with me, we of course did not complete the purchase from Carrefour until Bogdan was completely convinced that everything was OK with the 2 bikes and all the systems on the bikes were tuned to a good level of functionality. Yes, we spent about an hour in the sports section of Carrefour Orhidea tuning the breaks, the suspensions, the gear-shifters, the position of the steering and a few other things I can't even name. While Bogdan was fine-tuning things on one bike I took the other for a spin through the shop.
It's true what they say: once you learn to ride a bike you never forget. It was about 10 years since I had last ridden a bike and I managed to do it through Carrefour without knocking down anything.
After we picked up the last bike from First Bike and Costi came by to get his and ride it home Bogdan dismantled the remaining two bikes and half my car so that I could get the bikes to Comarnic. By the time I managed to pick up the rest of my stuff from the apartment (at rush hour) and actually got to Comarnic it was 11:15 pm.
It took me another hour or so to put my bike back together and get debriefed, so it was about 12:30 am when I took it for its first ride.
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