Tam On Transit

A necessity of long travel, laundry beckoned this day. I woke up early, snagged breakfast at the hostel, spent some time drafting blogs (yet to be posted), and walked over to a laundromat. Utrecht may be 900 years old this year, but life essentials blend right into shopping and residential where mixed-use never went out of style. Washing, 4.80€. Drying, 2.40€. Walking around urban canals still used for merchants and pleasure boats, priceless. (Cash only.) After finishing my laundry, I bumped into some others from our crew blogging in the hostel lobby (which is set up something like a coffee shop or other eat/work/chat space). A few of us (Delaney, Nick, and I) set off for lunch from a vegetarian food cart with the particular style of food from the same state of India where our classmate, Anisha, hails from. Oh. My. God. It was delicious!  The cart had a prime place next to the previously-mentioned mall. We headed in to find a few other necessitie...

Sunday was a rest day for me. I figured out how to work the hostel's laundry machines. I took a stroll and had delicious coffee with a Danish apple tart. It tasted something like a very cinnamon bread pudding with baked apple slices (and optional sour cream). Yum! I enjoyed relaxing and watching people go by. Then, I strolled further still, picked up a hotdog from a hotdog stand, and spent a good hour watching people at Nyhavn (that's the colorful rowhouses on a small harbor that's on so many postcards). After the people's watching, I headed back to the hostel for my check in with the instructors. The structure of this course works really well for the purposes of leaning about bikeable urbanism and experiencing the possibilities firsthand. All of the built aspects of the bike infrastructure could be done anywhere--including and especially US cities and towns. It's straightforward. It could be done without a bunch of complications. It's re...