13 Dec Cycling

I’m a little late with writing about my cycling adventure… I remember that on one of the days of orientation, when all international students were gathered in the great lecture halls, we were asked a specific thing that we wanted to do or accomplish for ourselves during our time in San Francisco. Apart from the fact that, like everyone, I wanted to experience American Student life, I also wanted to take the philosophy courses that are not available back at home in Amsterdam, I wanted to learn what it is like to built up a life completely from scratch. But also, I wanted to embark on a challenging journey: I wanted to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, by bicycle. It was this bicycle trip that I mentioned when the microphone was handed to me. I am very happy that I mentioned that specifically, since it was because I portrayed myself as a cyclist that I met Anja, also someone who is very passionate about cycling and who has become such a good friend over the past four months.

I did not have a road bike when I arrived here in San Francisco, so I had to buy one. I had to buy one with my student budget, so that meant that I was going for a bicycle from craigslist. On craigslist, I found a guy named Chris, who worked for the recycling company Recology. Chris is very passionate about anything that has to do with recycling, therefore, one of his hobbies is to find bicycle parts on the street, in garbage dumps, or online and to build ‘new’ bikes from these parts. He has a container where he stores his bikes, and during weekdays between 17:00 and 19:00 you can find him there selling and repairing bikes. That day he was pretty busy, so I helped him a little with his small business, I helped taking the bikes out of the container and I helped repairing some of them. At the end of the day, he was grateful for my help, so he gave me a discount on the bike that I had chosen for myself, it turned out to be a great deal for a student like me.

So I had found a road bike, the next plan was to figure out an itinerary for the trip. I figured that it was going to be a pretty though trip, it was 474 miles, in 5 days. I had to do it in five days since I did not want to miss classes. But even though I had to hurry a little bit, it became one of the most beautiful and inspiring trips of my life. More about this cycling trip in the next blog!