tikit arrival, strike in Paris, Friday night ride

I thought that updating twice a week wouldn't be that difficult, but it seems as though I'm having some problems with that goal. I attempted to write something on Wednesday in reference to the arrival of my tikit, but the words wouldn't come. I will do my best to recap the highlights of the week, and next week I will attempt to update more regularly.

Bike Friday shipped my tikit on Monday and for the first half of the week, I tracked it on the FedEx webpage as it crossed the US, the Atlantic, landed in Paris, boarded a delivery truck, and arrived at my school. On Wednesday afternoon I found it waiting for me in the office of IES where the secretary was very excited to see what was in the enormous package for me. I took the box into the courtyard and opened it to find my tikit, partially disassembled, and spent an hour putting it together and getting familiarized with its workings. Many students stopped to see what new gadget I had and I did my best to explain it to them, but the novelty of receiving a package in the mail seemed more interesting than the novelty of having a bicycle.

I gave it my first test ride while going to drawing that night and on my first day with the tikit, I logged about 15 kilometers- from IES to my drawing studio to my apartment.

It arrived just in time for the transportation strike that was scheduled to happen on Thursday. Most of the Metro lines and bus routes were closed and many Parisians were out on bicycles trying to get to work or school, but there were also many more cars than usual. I successfully rode to school for the first time and got many interested looks as I passed other cyclists and I wonder if other folding bicycles get the same attention. I stopped at a café between my first IES class and my drawing class (because my second IES class had been canceled due to the difficulty for the professor to get to school because of the strike) and while I was there, a curious server at the café took down the name of the bicycle and the website, which is conveniently written on the side of the bike. www.tikit2ride.com. I wished I had had a brochure to give to him, but unfortunately it isn't quite ready to be printed. Soon, I hope.

On Friday night, I met up with a group of cyclists near the Hotel de Ville where an organization leads night rides by bicycle every Friday night. When I arrived there were only about 30 people, with 10 or 15 members of the organization wearing bright orange vests, but a half an hour later when we departed, the group had swelled to over 100 people. A man who was making announcements at the beginning of the ride said that the largest group on a Friday night was around 950 cyclists. The largest critical mass I've ever attended in Minneapolis probably only had around 150 people attending- I can't imagine kind of crowd attends the Paris critical mass.

Here's a couple photos from the ride last night:









I found it hard to approach people at the group ride because most of the people there already knew each other (it seemed) and they were all bunched in their own groups, talking in their preferred languages. I heard German, French, and during the ride I heard some young people speaking English. I approached them, since I knew we would automatically have two things in common, bikes and English, and joined their conversation. I found that one of the girls was from LA and was in Paris on vacation and met a boy who is French, and also met a young American who is working in the suburbs of Paris at a paper company.

The four of us rode together for the remainder of the ride until the girl from California got a flat tire and we all stopped to try and fix it. The valve broke off of her spare tube so instead of walking back to her apartment, she rode on the back of the French boy's bike and the other American rolled the her bicycle alongside him while we all rode back together. At her destination, we exchanged emails and parted ways, but I think tonight I might meet up again with the girl from California.

The weather has been dry in Paris for the past week which has been very pleasant for biking. I'm glad it wasn't raining on the day of the strike- it would have made it a lot more difficult for the people trying to bike to work, and I'm sure the traffic would have been much worse. It's evening now and I'm sitting on a bench in a garden that was sunny 15 minutes ago, but now the sun has gone behind a building and my hands are getting too cold to type.

I believe this is a formidable blog entry; I hope there are no hard feelings for my sparsity of posts.