www.qianqin.de » car

Subwoofer for my car

Qian Qin — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:16:39 +0000

Good sound systems have a subwoofer, that’s why I needed one for my little car. Because my car’s trunk is extremely small, I needed a special subwoofer case to fit it in without robbing space or removing the spare wheel. So I constructed one myself. Read more for some more pictures.

For more information, check out the German version “Subwoofer für den Lupo“.

Amsterdam by car

Qian Qin — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:11:50 +0000

Last weekend, I went to Amsterdam with my girlfriend. While looking for a hotel to stay at, it struck me that almost no hotels offer parking space. Weird, I thought and googled for public parking spaces and their costs. € 50 a day! That’s more than I pay for the hotel! A closer look on Google Maps revealed the problem. Amsterdam has a lot of very narrow one-way streets. So how do I get to Amsterdam by car without paying millions for parking?

Luckily, Amsterdam offers Park and Ride. This is a service which allows you to park outside the city and ride with public transportation to the city. For € 6 a day, we parked at P+R Sloterdijk and even got 2 train tickets to Amsterdam Central Station for free. Remeber not to throw those tickets away. You will need to return them to get the special € 6 price. If you loose them, you will need to pay the normal price of around € 15 a day. From Sloterdijk, it’s only 7 minutes to Amsterdam Central Station. The train ticket costs € 2,20 (for the way back), so it’s much cheaper than parking in the city, especially when all parking spaces are full even with those inhuman prices! Anyway, Amsterdam is a really small city and we could easily go to anywhere interesting by feet. If you are really lazy, you might take the tram, but then you couldn’t take a closer look at the beautiful scenery with all those pretty houses.

So in the end, it wasn’t a too expensive trip even though food was around €12 / meal.

my first car

Qian Qin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 04:22:40 +0000

When you live in Berlin, a car isn’t really nessecary. You can get anywhere with public transportation. But in the winter or at night, a car is much more comfortable. That’s why my girlfriend and me bought a car together.

After testing a few cars, we decided to get a Volkswagen Lupo. It’s a pretty small car which can hold up to 4 people without getting too uncomfortable. Insurrance and tax are both cheap, so is the gas usage. I need around 7l / 100km in the winter for driving in the city, which is 1l more than in the summer. On the high way, usage goes down 1l. We got it for € 2300 a month ago, that’s why I haven’t been posting here. Having a car is really nice, except when you need to look for parking spaces…