Cycling to Marken
Given how much Marken is part of my personal cycling lore, I am surprised that I never managed to bike there all the way from Amsterdam. The distance (a 40km round-trip) must’ve had something to do with it. With my recent e-bike purchase, that was no longer a plausible excuse. My wife and I cycled there a month ago.
Our ride took us through open fields, along stately farmhouses, over quaint wooden bridges, and even on dykes.
A drawbridge
This must surely be the narrowest two-way cycling lane we’ve ever ridden on:
A narrow cycling path and a wooden bridge
We saw no one for miles at end - so for the kind of traffic these bike paths were serving, they were plenty.
Pictures from Marken:
The colourful wooden houses of Marken
The colourful wooden houses of Marken
View of Markermeer
Views of Markermeer
Sparrows
I was really happy1 to see sparrows in Marken. While you occasionally hear a sparrow or two chirping in our neighbourhood on a quiet afternoon, I hadn’t seen so many of them together in a long time.
On our way to Marken, we had taken a couple of lengthy detours as we were feeling a little adventurous - though a couple of times our hands were also forced by ongoing repairs to the dykes in the area. It was also very windy on our way back. I struggled to hit 25 kmph even with the maximum assist my e-bike had to offer. The result was that the wife ran out of battery some time before she reached home and I barely scraped by. As someone who has never driven and is on his first vehicle powered by an external energy source, range anxiety is certainly a new feeling I am having to welcome.
And also a touch nostalgic.↩︎
On getting an electric bike…
I learned to bike in my 30s. It was my wife’s help and encouragement that made it possible. The excellent1 cycling infrastructure of Amsterdam played its part too - I could actually get somewhere I wanted to be on a bicycle here. Had we still been living in Bangalore, I don’t think I’d have learned to bike. I don’t see myself as someone who would’ve mustered sufficient motivation to overcome not just the non-existent cycling infrastructure but also the terrible traffic. And in some alternate timeline, had I still made it to Amsterdam without meeting my wife, I would’ve been quite content to use public transport or walk about2.
Within a few days of learning to bike, it became an act as natural as walking. But I still had a mental block that kept me from biking to work every day. That my commute involved cutting through the picturesque, historic canal ring of Amsterdam didn’t help. The route was meant to be savoured each day on foot, not rushed through on a bike.
A few years ago I landed a job that finally got me biking seriously. Fourteen kilometres a day - to my office and back. This was before the pandemic, so five days at office were still the norm. It was the fastest and cheapest way to get to work. Barring inclement weather or the occasional bouts of laziness, biking became my preferred way to commute. This was the first time the thought of getting an e-bike crossed my mind. Vanmoof had just started to rise in popularity here. We both knew friends who had purchased Vanmoof’s latest models and spoke favourably of their purchase. The wife and I even took test rides. But the clunky gear change mechanism of their then state of the art model didn’t sit well with either of us3. The lack of a detachable battery which would necessitate bringing the entire bike to our tiny apartment for charging was another factor that put us off. The other e-bikes of that time, especially from the staple Dutch brands (Batavus, Gazelle etc.) had felt clunky and heavy and so we did without one for the next few years.
All those days of working from home during the pandemic broke my cycling habit. My next jobs have again been a lot closer to our home. While biking is still the fastest way to get to the office, biking just 3-4 km somehow feels cheating. I do bike on some days but walking is my preferred way to get to work. It’s a 30-35 minute commute on foot and I get to take pictures, listen to a podcast or generally wool-gather.
Thanks to global warming, there is now at least a 6 month window (I’d say May-Oct) when cycling in Amsterdam is very pleasant. There are several small towns 15-20 kms from Amsterdam that make for great day trip destinations on your bike. We’d do one or two of these trips each summer but our legs would be so sore the next day that our resolution at the start of the summer to do these biking trips more regularly would fizzle out.
The wife again started considering getting an e-bike seriously a couple of years ago. I spotted a billboard4 for an up and coming direct to consumer Belgian e-bike brand called Cowboy and told her about it. Shortly after seeing the ad, we started spotting Cowboy bikes more regularly on the road. They weren’t available in bike shops but you could book a test ride on their website and someone would come to your home with one. Many people at the wife’s workplace already owned one. They spoke highly of the bike’s quality and Cowboy’s service. The wife booked a test ride and knew that she was getting one the moment it ended. The bike checked all the boxes for her - it was light, had a detachable battery and the step-through frame was the right size for her height - in a country where the average height is 182 cm (~6ft) that’s not a given. We ordered it online. It arrived a few days later and after minimal assembly, she was all set.
I took a ride too but hadn’t fully bought into the idea of an e-bike just yet. Besides, we didn’t want to put both our eggs in one basket - I’d keep looking for another brand.
Getting an e-bike really opened up distances for her. On weekends she’d casually ride down to Haarlem (a 40 km round trip) or Monnickendam (that’s another 32 km for a round trip) and still have energy to go to work the next day. On the handful of occasions I accompanied her, we’d either cut the ride short or I’d follow her from a great distance, out of breath and knees creaking from trying to keep up with her against 50 kmph wind.
Yes, the Netherlands is a flat country but even on a fine summer day, the wind can easily overcompensate for the lack of a climb uphill. But let’s not use the wind as an excuse here. Riding a manual bike for distances of 70-80 km over a weekend, even on a perfectly still weekend, would easily divest me of any delusions about my physical fitness. Paradoxically, I also worried about losing whatever fitness levels I did have by depending on e-bike - the mind saw an e-bike as a fancy crutch.
And so I held back for two more years. Perhaps because I have been ripe for a full-blown midlife crisis, a part of my brain started entertaining this fantasy where instead of an e-bike, I would get one of those light, carbon-fibre racing bikes. Surely, through this marriage of precision engineering and my brute force I would then be able to easily keep up with (and even fly past) my wife on her e-bike.
For the past three weeks we’ve been getting days that have been so perfect and idyllic that I’ve felt as if we are living inside an advertisement for summers. Naturally, the wife has been making the most of her e-bike and I’ve been accompanying trailing her on my manual bike. A ride back from one long trip where the wind knocked a good 5 km/h from my average speed, I finally opened up to the idea of getting an e-bike.
The wife who has been scouting the right e-bike for me ever since she got hers, couldn’t stand the thought of frittering another beautiful summer away and insisted that I go for another test ride. She even located a shop really close to our home that I could visit on a random Monday I had taken off from work. I opted to give Tenways CGO800S a shot. I took it along my office route which cuts through Amsterdam’s canal belt, has uneven traffic and the bridges over the canals present a short but decent incline. My test ride felt effortless, even joyful. I knew right then that this was it.
I have now had it for two weeks and we’ve already clocked over 120 kilometres. I had read that e-bike riders cover longer distances and so get same or more exercise as those riding manual bikes. This certainly rings true so far.
At 23 kg (including the battery) the bike is not much heavier than my current manual one of 19 kg. It also rides smoothly when the battery assistance is off. I’ve covered long stretches without battery assistance - only summoning it during periods of strong winds, when I need to catch a break after a particularly long stretch. Or when I’ve needed a little extra acceleration - for example when the traffic light turns green just as you have braked. Not ever having driven anything where an external force propels me (I don’t know how to drive or ride a scooter), I was worried I’d get addicted to speed. And while I admit it is thrilling to go from 0 to 25 km/h in under 10 seconds of light pedalling, it actually makes me lot less annoyed at having to stop for tourists crossing the bike paths heedlessly5. Say goodbye to road rage, say hello to traffic tranquillity?
Anyway, I hope to use the battery sparingly. I think of it like Mario stumbling upon a super star - a rare thing, makes you invincible for a short time and you are still liable to getting destroyed if you act rashly6.
I’ll leave you with a picture of the giant statue of the famous delftware kissing couple near the Zaandam ferry station. A 13 km round trip taken casually after a full day of work. When you have an e-bike, you are always looking to squeeze a ride in.
A giant statue of the Kissing Couple
I wouldn’t call it world-class because the cycling infrastructure here is in a class of its own. The state of what occasionally passes for cycling infrastructure in even the richest countries of the world is really quite pathetic in comparison.↩︎
Because Amsterdam does public transport and walking infrastructure equally well.↩︎
It’d make a loud click as you were pedalling and picking up speed. It felt jarring.↩︎
A bit of an anomaly for Amsterdam where there’s a handful of spots in the whole city where you would find such visual clutter.↩︎
Another feature of summer in Amsterdam.↩︎
The super star doesn’t save your life if you fall into a pit.↩︎
Old posts reappeared in this blog’s RSS feed
Those of you reading this blog on an RSS reader, might have noticed that several old posts reappeared in your feed yesterday. My apologies! Here’s what happened:
I’ve been restoring many past posts from my old wordpress blog. While looking at posts from 2011/12, I realised that the permalinks didn’t have any dates in the url. For example from looking at just this url:
https://www.deepakg.com/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam
you might think I am looking for a house in Amsterdam, while actually this is a post from 2011 when we first moved here. I changed the blog’s settings so that permalinks include the date component. The link above should now show up (e.g. in Google’s search result) as:
https://www.deepakg.com/2011/06/4/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam
One side effect of making this change was that it caused the platform I use for blogging to regenerate the RSS feed with the new urls. This might’ve led your RSS reader to think that these are new posts. Mine certainly did.
Pandemic flashback - the snow inside our letterbox
With each passing year it is getting harder to remember how it really felt to live through the pandemic years.
Early 2021 was still a period of a lot of uncertainty. The vaccines were here but the Dutch vaccination program was still in a disarray. This meant that lockdowns and curfews were still the Government’s primary tools to keep covid from spreading and making people sick in numbers that would overwhelm the healthcare system. And to top it off, the Dutch government had resigned in January over a scandal.
Against this depressing backdrop we got a week that lifted our moods up. The temperatures in Amsterdam started to dip in mid-February. The max temperature stayed a few degrees under 0ºC for nearly a week. Spells like these are increasingly rare1. We even got a freak storm during a day or two of this cold spell that moved around a lot of snow.
I remember stepping out for a walk with the wife along a route in our neighbourhood that we had by now traversed hundreds of times since Amsterdam went into lockdown in March the year before. A lot of people were out and about. Some to experience the novelty of snow in Amsterdam, others out of necessity of having to walk their dogs.
We didn’t get very far in the sub-zero weather. Our fingers and toes were painfully numb within 15 minutes of stepping out. I must have also been worried about slipping on the icy streets and hurting myself. A hospital visit in the middle of a covid wave would’ve been a memorable experience for all the wrong reasons. We were back home in no time. It took us both a shot of Jägermeister to restore sensation in our extremities.
When we checked our mailbox the next day, it was full of snow! We cleaned it out before the temperatures could rise and turn it into water.
Then the canals froze. It hadn’t been anything like the cold spell of the year 2012 and I don’t recall the ice ever being officially declared safe. Yet, a few brave souls began to venture onto the canals. We certainly kept our distance. There was an air of defiance against officialdom after all those months of lockdowns, and this felt every bit like an act of rebellion as much as something done for the sheer joy (or foolhardiness) of it. I vividly remember waking up one day to an otherworldly high-pitched pinging sound that skating on fresh, thin ice makes2. Someone was out skating on a section of a canal opposite our home that had frozen.
A frozen canal near our house
Brave souls on thin ice
A few days later as the ice and snow began to clear, we headed out for a longer walk. The sun was out and everything was resplendent in the winter light.
People had come together and made a giant snowman at Nieuwmarkt. The black upside-down bucket that acted as its tophat made it look like one of those shifty Victorian characters from a Charles Dickens novel. And may be because Brexit had so dominated the news those days (alongside the pandemic of course), I thought it bore a striking resemblance to Boris Johnson.
Since the year we moved here in 2011, there have been only 2 recorded instances of max temperatures being under 0ºC for 7 consecutive days or more in February-March. Data from KNMI↩︎
The squares of Lisbon
Lisbon has several spacious public squares. They all tend to have an imposing monument - usually a tall column commemorating a past King or an important historic figure - in their center and beautiful mosaic patterns on their floors made of white and black stones. We crossed Praça Dom Pedro IV (aka Praça do Rossio) several times during our recent visit:
Praça Dom Pedro IV
Praça Dom Pedro IV
Praça Dom Pedro IV
We found ourselves at Praça do Municipio one afternoon while returning from one of our long walks to nowhere in particular. I was stunned at how elaborate the pattern on the floor here was.
Praça Do Municipio
Today, I brought up the satellite imagery of these squares on Google Earth and their real grandeur and beauty finally sunk in:
Praça Dom Pedro IV
We were about three months too early for the jacaranda season - must be quite a sight.
Praça Do Municipio
Sightings after the King’s Day in Amsterdam
The municipality of Amsterdam deploys extra cleaning crews at night to clean up the mess people leave after the King’s Day celebrations. While they definitely deployed them this year too, I saw a lot more litter in some of the streets in the canal ring than I remember seeing in recent memory. One could hardly walk on Prinsengracht without shards of glass from broken beer bottles crunching under one’s shoes. And despite the recently introduced deposit scheme1 on aluminium cans, we saw many of them crushed and thrown on the street.
Litter on Brouwersgracht
Litter on Prinsengracht
Amsterdam was remarkably quiet on Sunday. The whole city was nursing a collective hangover. But just like the cleaning crews of the night before, some people had jobs to do that couldn’t wait. Like this team that was taking down the three-storeyed cut-out of the king and queen that a café in Amsterdam pins to their facade each year. I had written about this tradition of theirs in 2020 and how they had adapted during the pandemic lockdowns. Now even though I am pretty sure this happens every year (of course it does, giant cutouts of the royal family don’t materialise in situ magically), this was the first time I was seeing the cut-out being taken down.
A giant cutout of the Dutch King and Queen outside Cafe De Blaffende Vis being uninstalled
A giant cutout of the Dutch King and Queen outside Cafe De Blaffende Vis being uninstalled
A lot of King’s Day revelry takes place on the boats on the canals of Amsterdam2. To keep the boats from bumping into houseboats and the walls of the canals, the municipality instals these inflatable, floating, sausage-like protective barriers along the canals. A team of two was hauling them back onto a pontoon docked in a canal near our house, deflating them, folding them and neatly stacking them into rectangular storage cages. These will be stowed away till needed at the next event3.
A string of inflatable cylindrical barriers being reeled back
And surely it must also be someone’s job to take away these signs telling people not to urinate in public. But I guess that could wait until the next working day.
A sign telling people not to pee in public
10 May 2024: Update - Changed the first photo to the version from the phone. I had run it through Lightroom’s new Lens Blur feature. The feature creates a depth map from a plain image (you don’t need depth data from the phone’s sensor) and can mimic the shallow depth of field of a long lens. While the results often look good, it struggles with finer details like those around the lampheads of Amsterdam’s street lamps. It’s in an “Early Access” phase so hopefully will get better with time.
Generally after an event like these, you come across a lot of people by the grocery store deposit machine with 2-3 large trash bags full of cans and plastic bottles. As if collecting deposit is all they did for a living. The wife and I were wondering if Albert Heijn - one of the largest grocery store chain here in Amsterdam - would turn off their machines for a couple of days around King’s day to discourage professional scalpers. The one branch we visited on King’s Day had put a ‘defective’ sign on the day itself. And it was a proper mess around the machine too - the floor sticky with stale beer and leftover cola.↩︎
A matter of time before one of them wins Darwin Awards. Exhibit A.↩︎
Probably at the annual Pride canal parade on Aug 3, 2024?↩︎