Biking in Brno [a #projectBrno blog post, by me]
I swear, bicycles and wet tram tracks are my nemesis. Just came off for the first time over here. Nothing broken, but a bit bruised, so a medicinal beer seemed in order. And solitary beers are the fuel of your basic working Brno blogger, of course.
Summer is winding its way to a close in Central Europe. It's not heading straight that way -- some days are cool and grey, horribly reminiscent of the land I left behind, and others are warml, even sunny occasionally -- but prone to sudden torrential downpours, even more of them than in midsummer. I returned after Worldcon and Eurocon -- more on them anon -- and the next day it started to rain and didn't stop for three solid days. The Svltava was higher and faster than I've ever seen it, a real river, more than able to sweep the incautious away, when in the hot clear summer days it waned to a creek.
I've seen more of it of late as a new day-job means that I cross it every morning and evening on my way to and from my new office. At first, being terrified of the notion of attempting to cycle around a city that I still don't know very well on the wrong side of the road, I fought shy of using the fruit of considerable last-minute labours in London: partially disassembling my beloved Riese und Müller Birdy Blue, which I am convinced is the world's best folding bike. With the aid of my heroic, saintly next-door neighbour Dave, I did manage to get its dimensions down far enough to just barely squeeze it into my biggest suitcase, along with some packing materials. Starting riding on the right at the same time as starting a new job really didn't appeal, so I postponed and procrastinated about reassembling it for a few days.
Actually, it's not been as bad as all that. In some ways this is a fairly cycle-friendly city. There are few cycle-paths, but usage of the pavements ("sidewalks," for viewers from the Colonies) seems actively to be encouraged. Crumbling and uneven they often may be, but they're also frequently conveniently big and wide. Cycling across pedestrian crossings also seems commonplace, so, fighting my training and habits, I do that, too. Once you're actually on the wrong side it's mostly rather self-reinforcing. Turning left is the only time I tend to go awry, but then, I've yet to try to tackle a roundabout.
So once the bike was reassembled, on my first Friday evening, I decided to take the bull by the horns and just try it. A Romanian friend had offered to accompany me, but sadly, bailed, so I went solo and trembling. Google Maps doesn't do cycle-route planning for this city, but walking routes are usually viable. As it happened, my first thought -- going up to the Dam and the reservoir, Brno's favourite public amenity, looked eminently doable. There's a cycle route almost all the way along the river and all I had to do was half a kilometre to there and just turn right and follow the river until it turned into a big lake sort of thing.
So that's what I did, and mostly, it was fine. I took lights and a hi-viz waistcoat in case, although I didn't plan to tackle the roads in the dark. I set off, intoning keep on the right, keep on the right to myself in a constant undertone, and pedalled along the riverside.
And it was lovely. Tree-shaded, usually away from roads at all or at least all but minor residential back streets, and with the river burbling away to one side. Lots of other cyclists of all ages, a fair few roller-bladers and dog-walkers. Remarkably tranquil, it felt like riding through a park more than through a major city. It all went fine until the track diverted from the river, when my elite map-reading skills took me on a few kilometers' circular detour. The first time I stopped to check GMaps, I was almost exactly where I had made my previous map-check, twenty minutes earlier.
No matter -- find the river, follow it. The next map-check threw up a different problem, though. A fairly serious wardrobe malfunction -- my cheapo Lidl combat shorts, an extremely fortuitous early purchase when I arrived to the 30⁰ early-summer heat, had succumbed to the horn of my saddle in quite spectacular style, more or less from zipper to rear waistband. Jockey short integrity wasn't looking too promising either. But by this point, I was more than half way to my destination and rather enjoying myself. What to do? Turn back and flash my way the 6-7km home again? Try to find a tram and treat the commuters to a full moon as I boarded and debarked?
A minor snag in the process of bicycle reassembly was my salvation. I couldn't get the back rack back on properly -- its supporting cable was too frayed to re-fit. So I'd left it off. Not wanting to carry a backpack on a leisure ride, I'd brought a bum-bag for my sunglasses. Rearranging my hi-viz so that it was strung on the strap of the bum-bag to form a sort of crude kilt meant that I wasn't too likely to traumatise the poor burghers of Brno.
With which, I set back off and about twenty minutes later rolled into the Přísteviště district, surprisingly un-knackered given that I'd just done about twelve kilometres or so, on a bicycle for the first time in four months. And I hadn't died under the wheels of anything, not even a little bit. (I would have known, I remember the sensation distinctly from the previous times.)
I paused for a pint and a spot of dinner, like a good Czech, and took the #1 tram home. The better part of valour is discretion and all that sort of thing.
I've set off on other mini-expeditions since then, too. The next proper one was an attempt to reach the Olympia shopping centre, which lies on the southern edge of the city and houses the region's only Marks and Spencers. Remarkably enough, the best route to this turned out to be to go to the same river and turn left instead of right. It was less of a hike -- only about seven and a half klicks -- and quite unexpectedly it also took me past the Avion shopping centre, home of Brno's IKEA and biggest Tesco hypermarket. Things seem to cluster in this town.
An aspect of Czech cycle routes also revealed itself, one that I probably should have expected. In the less-than-gruelling five miles or so to Olympia -- it was worse on the Pelopponnese in the old days, I gather -- I passed two or three cyclist rest and refreshment stops.
That's pubs, in other words. Well, beer is a fine isotonic beverage for performance athletes and it tastes an awful lot nicer than Lucozade.
These were special cyclist pubs, off the road, located directly on the cycle track, with copious bike racks -- well-filled, too -- and lots of outdoor seating for weary pedallers taking on some golden nectar.
I approve. Well, in general terms. I'm not sure that lots of beer and urban bicycling is a great combination -- don't ask me how I know, I just know, OK? -- but the odd one on a hot afternoon sounds like a great idea. I wonder if you can make your way across the whole country, fuelled by regular imbibition of liquid bread at these fine caravanserais? I'm willing to try. For science, you understand.
Oh, and I did find Olympia, now conquered and colonized only by the great gods of retail. Today, it is the seat of Mammon's power. These included M&S, who were completely out of underwear or shorts in my size, but did have much-missed British delicacies such as shortbread, brown sauce, tea bags and bottles of bitter and actual proper IPA. I'll be back. Regularly, I suspect.
Other delights included an Albert hypermarket. Initially, I'd thought that this was a local chain, but I am told it's actually Dutch. Bigger doesn't always mean better -- for instance, it seemed to have that stalwart of Czech supermarkets, a huge and impressive cheese counter which contains a paltry assortment of about half a dozen cheeses. Your choices are waxy yellow hard cheese (in an assortment of fat contents), goat's cheese, Camembert-style soft white mini-wheels... and that's about it. Back in Tooting, I found the splendidly-named "Edamski" in a Polish shop. Here it's lurks under the the less-amusing sobriquet of "Eidam," and it dominates. Low-fat, medium-fat, full-fat, smoked, and possibly with bits in -- peppercorns, chillies, nuts, or suspicious pink chunks which I fear a sow somewhere once loved.
There's also Emmental, Gouda, Leerdammer and other basically-indistinguishable industrially-produced hard cheeses. Some of them have holes in and that really is about all the difference. If you go to the deli counter, they'll cheerfully cut you your desired serving size -- from big machine-extruded blocks which I strongly suspect came from the same factory. The only truly interesting one is Olomouc cheese, a strange, translucently whitish substance from Moravia's other metropolis. I use the word "interesting" in the same sense that someone removing their own appendix is interesting. They tell me it's traditional and a protected geographic designation. They're safe, nobody else would want it. This stuff owes its provenance to Moravia's fine history of weapons manufacture* and in Warsaw Pact days was probably classified as a bioweapon.
If you think I protest too much on the cheese front, it's probably because I'm living on the damned stuff when I eat out. I love cheese -- good job, too -- but in many smaller eating places, some variant on bread-and-cheese or bread-and-potatoes is about my lot. Occasionally for the sheer crazy hedonism of it all, I have and egg and cheese sandwich. Be still, my heart. (Actually, that's not a problem, thanks to all the cholesterol.)
One of the few surprises of Olympia was the large, shiny motorcycles lining some of the inter-store passageways. There were quite a lot of these, and some big ugly cars of the sort that the trophy partners of overpaid financial-industry workers take their pampered brats to school in. I skipped those. There were new Victory and Indian motorcycles, and some immaculately-restored, concours-condition Nortons and Triumphs, with price tags that caused heart failure more rapidly than the cheese. A third to a half a million crowns for a bike isn't quite so bad when you convert it -- most of the machines were in the ballpark of ten to fifteen thousand quid -- but I have to wonder how many Czechs can afford such toys.
So, yes. I should have known, really. Once, many many years ago, I rented a mountain bike for an afternoon in the Austrian Tyrol near Zell-am-See and pedalled up to the Alpine resort of Kaprun. I also borrowed my ex's old black shopper and wobbled around Oslo once or twice around the turn of the century. Riding on the right is not all that scary, although ask me again after the first time my emergency reactions are put to the test.
Which leaves me dreading the next thing... a Central European winter.
I'm actually hoping for a cold one. I hate British winters and their unrelenting grey dampness. Give me real cold, snow and ice, any day. But then, I say that based on a few long weekends in Oslo and the odd snowboarding trip to the French Alps.
It's fun when it's only for a week or ten days. A few months of it might be very different. I don't know yet. I'm told last year was unseasonally mild, that it barely dipped below freezing and hardly snowed at all. Of course, by the London standards I'm used to, that's on the distinctly cold side of perfectly normal. (Enjoy the Gulf Stream while it lasts, kids, it won't be around for much longer.)
Once the cycling season is over -- yeah, I'm a fairweather cyclist, I've got two metal limbs, bite me -- I'm hoping that there'll be enough snow for me to work on my cross-country skiing skills, at least, and maybe my snowboarding ones, too.
-----
* The "BR" in "Bren Gun" stands for Brno, you know, and "pistol" is probably fifty percent of the Czech vocabulary of my non-local readers**.
** The other half being "robot." "Pilsner" is German.
Summer is winding its way to a close in Central Europe. It's not heading straight that way -- some days are cool and grey, horribly reminiscent of the land I left behind, and others are warml, even sunny occasionally -- but prone to sudden torrential downpours, even more of them than in midsummer. I returned after Worldcon and Eurocon -- more on them anon -- and the next day it started to rain and didn't stop for three solid days. The Svltava was higher and faster than I've ever seen it, a real river, more than able to sweep the incautious away, when in the hot clear summer days it waned to a creek.
I've seen more of it of late as a new day-job means that I cross it every morning and evening on my way to and from my new office. At first, being terrified of the notion of attempting to cycle around a city that I still don't know very well on the wrong side of the road, I fought shy of using the fruit of considerable last-minute labours in London: partially disassembling my beloved Riese und Müller Birdy Blue, which I am convinced is the world's best folding bike. With the aid of my heroic, saintly next-door neighbour Dave, I did manage to get its dimensions down far enough to just barely squeeze it into my biggest suitcase, along with some packing materials. Starting riding on the right at the same time as starting a new job really didn't appeal, so I postponed and procrastinated about reassembling it for a few days.
Actually, it's not been as bad as all that. In some ways this is a fairly cycle-friendly city. There are few cycle-paths, but usage of the pavements ("sidewalks," for viewers from the Colonies) seems actively to be encouraged. Crumbling and uneven they often may be, but they're also frequently conveniently big and wide. Cycling across pedestrian crossings also seems commonplace, so, fighting my training and habits, I do that, too. Once you're actually on the wrong side it's mostly rather self-reinforcing. Turning left is the only time I tend to go awry, but then, I've yet to try to tackle a roundabout.
So once the bike was reassembled, on my first Friday evening, I decided to take the bull by the horns and just try it. A Romanian friend had offered to accompany me, but sadly, bailed, so I went solo and trembling. Google Maps doesn't do cycle-route planning for this city, but walking routes are usually viable. As it happened, my first thought -- going up to the Dam and the reservoir, Brno's favourite public amenity, looked eminently doable. There's a cycle route almost all the way along the river and all I had to do was half a kilometre to there and just turn right and follow the river until it turned into a big lake sort of thing.
So that's what I did, and mostly, it was fine. I took lights and a hi-viz waistcoat in case, although I didn't plan to tackle the roads in the dark. I set off, intoning keep on the right, keep on the right to myself in a constant undertone, and pedalled along the riverside.
And it was lovely. Tree-shaded, usually away from roads at all or at least all but minor residential back streets, and with the river burbling away to one side. Lots of other cyclists of all ages, a fair few roller-bladers and dog-walkers. Remarkably tranquil, it felt like riding through a park more than through a major city. It all went fine until the track diverted from the river, when my elite map-reading skills took me on a few kilometers' circular detour. The first time I stopped to check GMaps, I was almost exactly where I had made my previous map-check, twenty minutes earlier.
No matter -- find the river, follow it. The next map-check threw up a different problem, though. A fairly serious wardrobe malfunction -- my cheapo Lidl combat shorts, an extremely fortuitous early purchase when I arrived to the 30⁰ early-summer heat, had succumbed to the horn of my saddle in quite spectacular style, more or less from zipper to rear waistband. Jockey short integrity wasn't looking too promising either. But by this point, I was more than half way to my destination and rather enjoying myself. What to do? Turn back and flash my way the 6-7km home again? Try to find a tram and treat the commuters to a full moon as I boarded and debarked?
A minor snag in the process of bicycle reassembly was my salvation. I couldn't get the back rack back on properly -- its supporting cable was too frayed to re-fit. So I'd left it off. Not wanting to carry a backpack on a leisure ride, I'd brought a bum-bag for my sunglasses. Rearranging my hi-viz so that it was strung on the strap of the bum-bag to form a sort of crude kilt meant that I wasn't too likely to traumatise the poor burghers of Brno.
With which, I set back off and about twenty minutes later rolled into the Přísteviště district, surprisingly un-knackered given that I'd just done about twelve kilometres or so, on a bicycle for the first time in four months. And I hadn't died under the wheels of anything, not even a little bit. (I would have known, I remember the sensation distinctly from the previous times.)
I paused for a pint and a spot of dinner, like a good Czech, and took the #1 tram home. The better part of valour is discretion and all that sort of thing.
I've set off on other mini-expeditions since then, too. The next proper one was an attempt to reach the Olympia shopping centre, which lies on the southern edge of the city and houses the region's only Marks and Spencers. Remarkably enough, the best route to this turned out to be to go to the same river and turn left instead of right. It was less of a hike -- only about seven and a half klicks -- and quite unexpectedly it also took me past the Avion shopping centre, home of Brno's IKEA and biggest Tesco hypermarket. Things seem to cluster in this town.
An aspect of Czech cycle routes also revealed itself, one that I probably should have expected. In the less-than-gruelling five miles or so to Olympia -- it was worse on the Pelopponnese in the old days, I gather -- I passed two or three cyclist rest and refreshment stops.
That's pubs, in other words. Well, beer is a fine isotonic beverage for performance athletes and it tastes an awful lot nicer than Lucozade.
These were special cyclist pubs, off the road, located directly on the cycle track, with copious bike racks -- well-filled, too -- and lots of outdoor seating for weary pedallers taking on some golden nectar.
I approve. Well, in general terms. I'm not sure that lots of beer and urban bicycling is a great combination -- don't ask me how I know, I just know, OK? -- but the odd one on a hot afternoon sounds like a great idea. I wonder if you can make your way across the whole country, fuelled by regular imbibition of liquid bread at these fine caravanserais? I'm willing to try. For science, you understand.
Oh, and I did find Olympia, now conquered and colonized only by the great gods of retail. Today, it is the seat of Mammon's power. These included M&S, who were completely out of underwear or shorts in my size, but did have much-missed British delicacies such as shortbread, brown sauce, tea bags and bottles of bitter and actual proper IPA. I'll be back. Regularly, I suspect.
Other delights included an Albert hypermarket. Initially, I'd thought that this was a local chain, but I am told it's actually Dutch. Bigger doesn't always mean better -- for instance, it seemed to have that stalwart of Czech supermarkets, a huge and impressive cheese counter which contains a paltry assortment of about half a dozen cheeses. Your choices are waxy yellow hard cheese (in an assortment of fat contents), goat's cheese, Camembert-style soft white mini-wheels... and that's about it. Back in Tooting, I found the splendidly-named "Edamski" in a Polish shop. Here it's lurks under the the less-amusing sobriquet of "Eidam," and it dominates. Low-fat, medium-fat, full-fat, smoked, and possibly with bits in -- peppercorns, chillies, nuts, or suspicious pink chunks which I fear a sow somewhere once loved.
There's also Emmental, Gouda, Leerdammer and other basically-indistinguishable industrially-produced hard cheeses. Some of them have holes in and that really is about all the difference. If you go to the deli counter, they'll cheerfully cut you your desired serving size -- from big machine-extruded blocks which I strongly suspect came from the same factory. The only truly interesting one is Olomouc cheese, a strange, translucently whitish substance from Moravia's other metropolis. I use the word "interesting" in the same sense that someone removing their own appendix is interesting. They tell me it's traditional and a protected geographic designation. They're safe, nobody else would want it. This stuff owes its provenance to Moravia's fine history of weapons manufacture* and in Warsaw Pact days was probably classified as a bioweapon.
If you think I protest too much on the cheese front, it's probably because I'm living on the damned stuff when I eat out. I love cheese -- good job, too -- but in many smaller eating places, some variant on bread-and-cheese or bread-and-potatoes is about my lot. Occasionally for the sheer crazy hedonism of it all, I have and egg and cheese sandwich. Be still, my heart. (Actually, that's not a problem, thanks to all the cholesterol.)
One of the few surprises of Olympia was the large, shiny motorcycles lining some of the inter-store passageways. There were quite a lot of these, and some big ugly cars of the sort that the trophy partners of overpaid financial-industry workers take their pampered brats to school in. I skipped those. There were new Victory and Indian motorcycles, and some immaculately-restored, concours-condition Nortons and Triumphs, with price tags that caused heart failure more rapidly than the cheese. A third to a half a million crowns for a bike isn't quite so bad when you convert it -- most of the machines were in the ballpark of ten to fifteen thousand quid -- but I have to wonder how many Czechs can afford such toys.
So, yes. I should have known, really. Once, many many years ago, I rented a mountain bike for an afternoon in the Austrian Tyrol near Zell-am-See and pedalled up to the Alpine resort of Kaprun. I also borrowed my ex's old black shopper and wobbled around Oslo once or twice around the turn of the century. Riding on the right is not all that scary, although ask me again after the first time my emergency reactions are put to the test.
Which leaves me dreading the next thing... a Central European winter.
I'm actually hoping for a cold one. I hate British winters and their unrelenting grey dampness. Give me real cold, snow and ice, any day. But then, I say that based on a few long weekends in Oslo and the odd snowboarding trip to the French Alps.
It's fun when it's only for a week or ten days. A few months of it might be very different. I don't know yet. I'm told last year was unseasonally mild, that it barely dipped below freezing and hardly snowed at all. Of course, by the London standards I'm used to, that's on the distinctly cold side of perfectly normal. (Enjoy the Gulf Stream while it lasts, kids, it won't be around for much longer.)
Once the cycling season is over -- yeah, I'm a fairweather cyclist, I've got two metal limbs, bite me -- I'm hoping that there'll be enough snow for me to work on my cross-country skiing skills, at least, and maybe my snowboarding ones, too.
-----
* The "BR" in "Bren Gun" stands for Brno, you know, and "pistol" is probably fifty percent of the Czech vocabulary of my non-local readers**.
** The other half being "robot." "Pilsner" is German.