Exodus to Amsterdam Göteborg

Like true good residents of the most bicycle-friendly city in the world, Shannie and I went out a couple of weeks back and purchased ourselves a couple of bicycles. We don’t own a car in Amsterdam. We have no plans to buy a car here, because for our lifestyle, we COMPLETELY don’t need one. Almost everywhere we’ll ever need to go to is within walking and/or biking distance within our apartment, and for the occasional times we need to go beyond that, both the public transit and high-speed rail system are more than adequate.

As it turns out, we picked one of the coldest, rainiest days since our arrival to go on a bike-buying run.

Shannie hasn’t been able to ride hers that much, due to her tumble down our staircase a few weeks back, but my new bike has found use every day since. If, by looking at the photo above, you think that it looks a bit too small for me, you’re 110% correct. It was the biggest bike the shop had in stock, though, so I’m making do. Our bikes are probably 20 years old, rusty, and built like tanks. However, with the rate that bikes get stolen here, we didn’t want to fork out for anything expensive. I brought my Surly Cross-check with me from Canada, but it stays up in our apartment and isn’t used for daily commuting, since it would take about 30 seconds to get nicked.

Almost all bikes here are virtually identical, which is by design. It’s the bikes that stand out, the ones that look different that get pinched. However, this has the unpleasant side effect of often leaving me scratching my head, forgetting exactly where I’ve parked, wondering which one of the thousands of identical bikes is mine. Luckily, the inner nerd in me found a fairly inconspicuous way of telling mine apart.

I am SUCH a fanboy.

scott amsterdam, you big tourist bicycles, rain, walking