door zone

There is something to be learned from the bike lanes here, which are generally elevated to half the level of the sidewalks, in a different brick color, and wide enough for two cyclists. Unlike on your typical American bike lane--which you should generally ignore--you can ride outside of the 'door zone' here and not crash into the door of some idiot motorist who didn't bother to see you coming. (The outcome of such accidents, which is usually injury or death for the cyclist and nothing much for the motorist, seems to me to defy natural selection.) This Belgian design seems very useable, and Cyclists Against Bike Lanes would have to reevaluate its agenda here since there are simply so goddamn many bikes. In fact, today off the Grote Markt was an entire two-level portable used bike store. Incredible.

My biking buddy of bygone days Mark appears to be rocking New Haven again, and sent me a great list of social effects of motorized transport, including this tidbit: "Equipped with [a bicycle], man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."

In my fledgling roadgeek-hood, I have found a Yahoo! group about abandoned highways. Perhaps someone there knows about the abandoned stretch in CT that Joe mentioned. Interestingly, a lot of progress is being made in turning the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike into a bike trail. Like the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail (of which my fascinating friend Will Farnam's great-grandfather was the engineer) and the High Line in New York, abandoned thoroughfares seem to be coming back to life all over the place. Which is great, although it means fewer abandoned roads to explore.

The people in stores today were very friendly and inquisitive. Maybe it's a weekend thing. On my way to the home repair store, I stumbled across not only the mysterious bike activity (which turned out to be free bike repair offered by the city) for which I had seen Dutch posters, but also a GIGANTIC Rommelmarkt (flea market) that had overtaken an entire neighborhood--I shopped for over an hour and still didn't get to see it all. There is so much to discover here that I worry that all the interesting events must be happening in September and the rest of the year will be dull. How many wonderful surprises can one little city have up its sleeve?

Small surprises also abound. Like the BMX fountain pen that I bought at the supermarkt today, or the "diet" Special K cereal interspersed with dark chocolate shavings. I must have been Belgian in a past life, because while I bought this on the spot and thought it the greatest thing ever, I can imagine why the American company Kellogg's doesn't market it in the US--people would never trust it to be healthy. And who knows, perhaps it contains a lot more calories than boring American Special K--but here, you walk/bike the extra kJ off on the way home from the store anyway.

I am finally developing the ability to figure out what words mean in Dutch without looking them up, and every realization feels like a grand revelation. Furthermore, I am finally done painting. Biked home with a giant CASA bag with three holes draped over me though pouring rain and thunder and lightning, stepped into puddles probably tainted with gasolene in my flipflops, and didn't mind any of it in the least. Truly a remarkable adjustment for a self-declared hydrophobe.