Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I know, I know.  It's been awhile.  I've discovered that this is harder than it looks, and it's been a busy week or so.  But I'm sitting here watching the Cubs, so I thought I'd give it a stab.

Today's topic:  torture.  No, I'm not going to get all political on you, that's my brother's job.  I'm talking about a device that they have here that would do the Spanish Inquisition proud.  I'm not quite sure what the English term is, but here they call it a "bicycle".  

Now, I knew that I was going to be getting one of these before I even got here.  I almost bought one in the States before I left, but then I realized that if I did that it wouldn't get here until the end of this month or so, and I needed some form of transportation before that.  Since I haven't got up the courage to drive here as yet (and gas is around $9 a gallon), I went and got me a torture machine.  I say torture machine because I haven't been on one for around, oh I don't know, twenty five years or so, nor am I in the best of shape regardless.  So yeah, after the first torture session, my ass hurt.  A lot.  And my ass continued to hurt for around two weeks.  And my legs are still pretty much jello.  But I know it's good for me in the long run, and quite frankly, I don't have much of a choice.

That's a picture of my tormentor above.  It's a trekking bike made by Winora, called the Jamaica.  24 speeds, good suspension on the wheels as well as the seat, and the widest seat that they had available.  Now that I've gotten a little more used to it, I gotta say, not a bad bike.  Of course, at the prices they charge for bikes here, it better be.  It's not a hundred percent, but I'm pretty sure that I could have gotten about four good bikes in the States for what I paid for this one.  Part of me wonders whether it's just simple supply and demand working it's magic, with the popularity of bikes here.

Bikes are huge in this town, and I mean huge.  You can say a place is bike-friendly, but you haven't seen anything until you come to Erlangen and check out how the bicycle fits into this town's life.  There are just over 105,000 people here and there are 85,000 bicycles (yes, 105 and 85 - that is not a typo).  However, the place is also designed to accommodate a lot of bikes.  The sidewalks are wide enough for both pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and color coded to boot - red brick for bikes, regular concrete for pedestrians.  And where the sidewalks aren't wide enough there are bike lanes on most of the roads, even though people on bikes go pretty much wherever they want to go anyway.  

And the interesting thing is that they get away with it.  Bikes really do seem to have priority here.  If you're riding on some of the smaller roads in the center part of town where I live that don't have enough room on the sidewalk, or no real bike lane, cars behind you simply follow you (busses, too - that's not unnerving or anything).  They don't honk or tailgate or anything, they just follow until they can either pass you or you can get on the sidewalk.  It takes a bit of getting used to, really.  I still don't trust that a car won't run me down, but every time I get in a situation where I'm waiting on a car, they're slowing down to let me pass first.  It's weird.

So that's that from Germany for today.  I know this one wasn't as interesting as (hopefully) the previous posts, but again, I'm no writer, so give me a little slack.  I'm trying to figure out how to best describe the local beer festival, and when I do that, I'll be back.  Don't say you weren't warned.