Tales of transport:

A couple of stories from my commutes:

1) The other day it started raining in the afternoon, so I left my bike in the city center and took the bus home. Obviously, the next morning I had to take the bus back in to get it, and it was one of my more memorable bus rides. After a couple weeks of riding my bike, I've begun to dread the unpredictable nature of the bus and the potential for uncomfortable trips. However, on this particular day, it looked like things were in my favor.

For starters, the bus showed up at my stop within a minute of me getting there, which is always nice -- plus it looked fairly empty from the outside. I got on, and was greeted by a somewhat over-enthusiastic bus driver who was dancing along to the pumping techno that he apparently had decided to blast over the bus speakers. As I headed back to my seat (the bus was relatively empty, and I got a seat, which is not usually the case), I wondered whether I had unwittingly stumbled onto some sort of joke party bus that was taking us to a rave at 11:00 in the morning. I sat in my seat, and the bus driver thankfully turned down the music, the volume of which until then had been set to somewhere between "11" and "sonic boom." The ride was fine and uneventful for a couple of stops -- although the bus driver did at one point start honking along with the music for a solid twenty seconds -- but within minutes, the ride had degraded into the misery that I've found is common on good old 6A. We pulled up at a stop that looked like Times Square on New Years Eve, except that the millions of screaming people are all small, hyperactive young children. Sure enough, all fifty of them (and, inevitably, their two or three underprepared chaperons) piled on, which was more than a little snug. One friendly little guy hopped into the seat next to me, which was fine until he started trying to wrestle with the kid in front of him. I passed ten more lovely minutes on the bus being jostled and generally unhinged by a horde of wild Danish pre-adolescents before they thankfully all streamed off and I was able to continue my ride in peace. Needless to say, I'm sticking with the bike.

Speaking of biking, more tales from the rat race:

2) Yesterday I was biking home after school when some unwitting pedestrian looked like he might step into my path. I was just about to say something and/or start ringing my bell accusingly at him (see previous posts), when he turned around, and I noticed his dark glasses and white and red cane. My bad.

3) Less than a minute later, I was passing another biker, when I noticed something odd. As he was riding his bike, he held crutches in one hand (his right foot was in a walking cast) while talking on his cell phone with the other. With common sense like that, I wonder how he could have gotten hurt in the first place...

4) And finally, also on yesterday's ride back from school (an eventful one, for sure), I was just pedaling along, minding my own business, when something caught my eye. There are a lot of bikers in Denmark, so naturally we end up packed pretty tight sometimes, and in this particular case, I was riding close behind a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. Although it is difficult to confirm from a bicycle, I'm reasonably certain that this woman was one of the two or three women in Denmark who are not certifiably gorgeous, and fortunately enough for me, an enormous portion of her thong was hanging out in my face. I'm sure this happens a lot, but it's the first time I've noticed. Regardless, I dropped it into a low gear and hightailed it out of there. All I know is, by the time she got home, she probably needed a pair needlenose pliers or minimally-invasive surgery to take care of that wedgie. Good times.