cycling – Saurabh Garg's Blog

I have always had a bicycle. Well, always except my time in college and when I lived in the US. Now that I live in The Netherlands, a country renowned for its cycling infrastructure, it is something that I enjoy not just for short commutes, but also as a way to spend leisure time.

While I have mostly rented or used the popular OV-Fiets bike share program to go on weekend trips around the country, I decided to get my own bicycle this past April. I figured that it would be nice to have a better quality bicycle at my disposal than the ones that are available through bike-share or rental programs. For a brief while, I even thought about getting one of the more in-vogue electric bicycles — wouldn’t it be fun to spend the same amount of effort to travel even faster — so I thought. Well, it isn’t, because the bicycles I explored either had really bad range or suffered from quality issues. I thought — if I only get a range of 50-60kms per charge, I could pedal that much on my own without an electrical assist. And so, I got a cheap(er) Dutch ‘transport’ bicycle with 3 gears and a pedal brake.

Now, while everyone is deciding to buy a bicycle to eschew public transportation, it also means that I could no longer take a bicycle on the train every weekend and ride somewhere new. I am now literally confined to a radius around home, unless I want to buy a mask and risk getting a Coronavirus infection. Luckily, Amsterdam is surrounded by nature in every direction. And so, over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find a regular rhythm, more so because summers are especially tragic when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet 🙂

It’s almost become therapeutic now. Also amazing is that I could take multiple different routes to get to the same spot. I don’t even need a map anymore. Often times, I run into the same people cycling after work or just exercising. It has become a nice new habit.

There are two expansive golf courses near where I ride. There is also a great amount of flora and fauna — I speed past wild berries and lots of birds. Being summer, the grounds are often full of families grilling and just having a grand time.

These wind-turbines are massive structures!

The thing about cycling in The Netherlands is that the whole country is a natural park. Even along cycle paths, you would find benches and rest areas with amazing views of waterways, nature, or just other cyclists merrily enjoying the planet. Even industrial areas have features.

One of the highlights of my routine has been the occasional chocolate aroma that blows from the nearby chocolate factory when the timing and the wind-direction is just right. Talk about adding flavor to life!

The Netherlands entered its first ‘intelligent lockdown’ late in the afternoon on Sunday, 15th March of this year. I say first because as of this writing it’s becoming clear to me that the worst is yet to come. I am not hoping for it, but looking at everything happening — political inaction to civil protests around these lockdowns — it’s becoming clear that a lot of things are happening when they shouldn’t and at a speed that’s best described as hasty.

Intelligent lockdown for Netherlands has essentially meant life as normal. There have been about 8,000 fines handed out for violating the 1.5 meter rule or for organizing hangouts in public (or even hidden inside homes in some cases). Restaurants have been closed for the most part, some catering to takeaway and delivery customers, although, from all I have seen, it’s mostly been an exercise in survival, not profiting. Schools and ‘contact professions’ have been closed for about 2 months; the latter has been a huge point of contention as people could skip out on meals, but a haircut is worth protesting over.

Today, the contact professions were allowed to reopen their businesses. This led to people getting haircuts at midnight! Daycares also opened up although attendance wasn’t at 100%. Even then, a surprisingly large number of families were obviously waiting for them to reopen as only about 15-20% of children missed out on day 1.

So, what changed for me over these weeks? In short, not much. I did start making coffee at home. We have had a Moka Pot for a very long time and only used it a few times up until March. What used to be a daily routine of going to my favorite cafe for a couple coffees and newspaper reading has converted into a long walk with podcasts playing, followed by coffee at home. We have been going on twice-daily walks, and although V had the initial bout of daily cooking (for some sort of competition with friends online), cooking is back to normal levels.

What has changed a lot, though, has been our immense appreciation towards Amsterdam. While it was always special to us, the lack of crowds has made the city ever more wonderful. Where we would fight crowds every weekend to get to our favorite spot for banana bread (interestingly, lockdown’s favorite recipe globally has been banana bread; I guess we had it coming), these days it’s a calm and peaceful walk through the center of the city. The bakery is not crowded inside (since only takeouts are allowed) and the owners even spend minutes chatting with us. It’s all very ‘quaint’ in a way.

Cycling through the city is a lot more pleasurable now. Indeed, whereas previously my idea of a warm Saturday was to take the train to somewhere to cycle in the nature, this time around we’ve been undertaking a lot of cycling trips straight from home. I even got a brand new bicycle, for the second time in 10 years, a couple weeks ago.

It turns out that less tourism makes cities more livable.

In the long term, I am not sure what changes we’ll see, but already a lot of governments are talking about changing their approach to tourism and inviting the ‘right’ kind of tourists; those that appreciate the city and try to go beyond the obvious sights and flavors. This could potentially also mean new kinds of travel businesses that connect travelers with the locals.

One thing is for sure — we’re not going to be back to normal anytime soon, not without a magical intervention.

And that’s good. Time is exactly what we need to mindfully appreciate what we’ve given up over the years and to be thankful about getting the chance to bring it back in our lives. We’re spending more time with family, reading more, writing more, and even learning more.

Sure, life hasn’t been all rosy for a lot of people impacted by job losses or financial difficulties, but it could have been far worse. We’re quite fortunate.