First impressions: Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu

Girl gets introduced to the wonders of biking, starts doing it for fun. Like Long Riders, only with high school girls rather than college students. Sounds promising, a nicely relaxed show about cute girls riding bikes together.

Okay, everything about this first scene annoyed me. First, if you haven’t biked since you were little, why would you make your first bike ride to school, on the first school day even? Why not practise first? Especially if you’re going to a new school? Second, how tiny are you that you can still use the same bike as when you were little? And how the hell did it stay this nice if you’ve never used it since? Especially since you just moved halfway through the country and still brought it with you.

Nevermind having to learn how to brake; this girl doesn’t even know how to pedal. She’s very lucky to run into (literally) the glasses girl on the left, who is infinitely patient in helping her learn to bike when she has to go to school herself.

Almost eleven minutes in we actually get our first competent woman bicyclist. Who turns out to be looking for the same school as the two girls, depending on a crude map drawn by her friend, rather than something like Google Maps that people in 2017 would actually use. But at least we’ve now met our three protagonists, all of which are flaky one way or another. Hiromi is just plain stupid, glasses girl Tomoe too nice for her own good and unnamed adult cyclist is a somewhat unreliable teacher at their school and will in all likelihood be the advisor to the biking club, when that finally makes its appearance.

So basically this first episode was all about the struggle to get to school on time if you’re not very bright and attempting to bike it for the first time, but at least we got an educational segment about how you can get a man to choose your bike parts for you.