Bikes

This morning I finished writing up the last result I want to put into this current paper. I'm still on the fence about where to submit it. I have to decide that before I start the re-write. Ya gotta know your audience.

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Spanish class had a new student from Italy today. Italian students usually speak Spanish relatively easily. The two languages are very similar.

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This afternoon I decided to just ride one of the bike shares along the river today for exercise. The game here is to keep swapping bikes in less than 30 mins to avoid getting charged. So far this year, I've manged to do, but today when my 5 minute warning went off, I was about 6 minutes from the nearest bike station. It's not that big a deal keeping it out longer. The charge is like 1 euro/hr, but I figured I'd try to get it to the station under 30. Well, I got over there and put it back into a slot at about 31 minutes. This turned out to be a mistake because, the system wouldn't let me pull a bike until I paid my balance. Unfortunately, I was in my gym clothes and didn't have my credit card with me. So I walked home about 2.5 miles.

I'll head out to the kiosk around the corner with my credit card and square up so I can use the bikes again.

On the plus side, for the first time I remembered to unpack the one pair of cycling gloves I brought with me from Walla Walla. Riding with padded gloves is soooo much more comfortable. Glad I finally remembered to pull them out.

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Speaking of bikes. The bike lane on the main street (a pedestrian street) near our building is woefully disregarded by the pedestrians. It's generally excusable though because the only real clue that there's a bike lane there at all is some very faded street markings and some subtly different street pavers. Well, that problem was solved today:

The freshly painted lines really seem to be working just based on my brief observations. People are now staying out of the bike lane (except for me while I take pictures, haha) and bikes are moving relatively freely.