Biking

One thing that I've been told since I got here is that I need to get a bike to ride.  It's a decent size city and the main mode of transportation is bikes.  In fact, they say there are more bikes than people in the

Here's a picture of our bike shed for our house.

Netherlands.  I've never lived in any kind of a city before so I think that Groningen seems very large but it has less than 200,000 people in it.  I think part of the reason it seems so big though is that, different from many of our cities back home, there aren't a ton of really tall buildings.  Rather, though densely populated, the city seems to spread out more than up.


The point in explaining all of this is to explain the significance of a bike in getting around the city.  People use their bikes to get to and from work, school, the stores, the parties and even for moving large furniture around....

If you are buying something large, say a couch, you can use one of these bike contraptions to get it home.  Of course, I think I would be terrified to even attempt such a crazy endeavor.  In case you can't tell from the picture, the box is on the front of the bike and hopefully you can see over whatever it is you're carrying.

There are shops that sell bikes but the recommended solution is to find them used online.  I went to a Facebook page call "For Sale in Groningen" and found a ton of used bikes for sale.  The problem with buying online is that you then have to go find these people to retrieve the bike.  After trying to message several people, I found somebody who was willing to meet to try to sell their bike.  The happened to live in another international student house so I was going to meet them there.  When trying to give directions, the best this person could offer was "it's easy to find, it's in the south of the city."  I found some better directions online, but I still struggle a bit with this because a lot of the websites come up in Dutch.  I didn't know exactly who I was looking for because their name on Facebook was a combination of letters, numbers, and some other kinds of symbols, and their picture was some animated rat thingy with its intestines hanging out.  But I really wanted this bike so I could stop looking and it seemed like a good deal at the time.

I wandered off to the south of the city and, after about two hours of trying to get extra directions knowing the very minimal amount of words in Dutch that I do, I knew I was in the right neighborhood.  I had also fallen off the bottom end of my map, so I hoped that was a good sign. When I finally found the place, I really didn't have a choice but to buy the bike, I had already come so far and I needed to go really far north to get to a meeting place in an hour. Plus, due to excessive wandering, I felt bad because I was a bit late meeting the guy with the bike.

The good news is that the bike came with a tire lock, lights and a bell.  The bad news that I soon found out was that the back brakes didn't work and it only had one gear.  The gear that the bike is apparently permanently in is the one that makes you feel like you're constantly climbing up a mountain.  It might not be that bad, maybe I just need to practice more on it, but  I have to say, for a country that's so incredibly flat, it seems rather difficult to peddle on this bike.

I think that I need to work up my bike stamina, and get used to the feeling of riding a bike, because it's been a while.  There are 2 ways that this might happen, my legs might feel sore for the next 5 months, or I will soon develop some seriously toned legs and my butt will stop hurting when I ride my bike.  I'm obviously hoping for the latter because the former is getting old.



Now that I have this bike, I'm working on trying to figure out all of the rule for the road.  I know that the front and back lights are required to be on at night so people can see you.  There's a bell on my bike that is what you're supposed to ring when you're passing people, but I doubt I'll be trying any of that anytime soon. It seems some people also give hand signals when they're going to turn.  There are bike locks built into a lot of the bikes that lock the back wheel in place.  This enables you to park your bike pretty much anywhere without having to actually hook it up to something.  There's also a back shelf sort of thing over the back tire that things could be hooked to.  It seems to be often used to hold passengers who sit precariously perched atop it.  So far, I have not been that daring.

On campus at home I'm pretty accustomed to wandering out in front of moving vehicles and feeling relatively safe about my chances of survival.  Here, I'm not so sure on that yet.  I see some signs, some of which are for cars and some are for bikes, but I'm not sure if they're always acknowledged by all travelers.  A Dutch guy told me that walkers have the right of way but there doesn't always seem to be a clear indication of that when cars come speeding by.  From my point of view, it seems that everybody just continues on at intersections and hopes for the best. So far so good for me but I'm still working on adjusting to the everything-will-fit-together-just-fine-and-we'll-avoid-running-into-each-other-if-we-all-pay-attention idea.  It can be kind of intimidating riding my bike around but I think I'm catching on.  The culture of it all just seems to be "don't do anything to crazy when commuting, and nobody will get hurt."  Nobody seems to get bent out of shape if they do have to wait for somebody to cut in front of them; everybody just seems to go with the flow.