I want to ride my bii-see-cal!
I rode a bike for the first time in about 8 years on Monday night! I’ve nabbed an old mountain bike of my brother’s and brought it down to Dungannon on Sunday night with the intention of biking to work every day to cut down on mileage and help me keep fit. So on Monday and Tuesday nights I took it out for a spin to try to figure out the gears (I’m not very proficient in that department as yet!) and today I managed make it to work and back on pedal-power. The way there involved a lot more hills than on the way back but I got a bit of a drenching coming home.

It brings back fond memories of my time in Germany eight years ago when I spent 4 months studying at the University of Regensburg as part of my undergraduate degree programme (though I can’t honestly say a huge amount of studying went on, Regensburg is a beautiful spot and we did as much travelling as possible!). The essential mode of transport for everyone there was a bike. So I managed to buy one for 50DM (about £18 at the time) which had all of 3 gears and definitely didn’t have a lot of street cred in terms of its looks. But it did the job and I got unbelievably fit – we cycled everywhere, it was great! My hall of residence was at the top of a steep hill – it took me a full week to be able to pedal up it without stopping to get off. And my room was on the fifth floor but there were no lifts, so I had to clamber up 75 steps to get to my room! I think it’s actually the fittest I’ve ever been in my life – my body didn’t know what had hit it! The set-up in Germany is so good for that kind of thing – bike lanes throughout the city, pedestrian crossings aren’t just for pedestrians but also for cyclists (there’s a wee green bike that lights up beside the wee green man!), cycle paths in the countryside, along rivers etc. When it came to the time for me to leave in August ’97 I couldn’t find a buyer for my bike, so I ended up just walking into a bike shop and leaving it there – that bike owed me nothing!

…which reminds me of a rather interesting incident. There were a couple of times that I had a few repairs to get done to the bike, and I went back to the man I’d bought it from. One day I knocked on his door to be greeted by his Norwegian wife dressed only in jeans and bra…yes you read that correctly! I just didn’t know where to look or what to say! She explained that she’d been ironing and because it was so hot she’d taken her blouse off… Okay, whatever!