Heaven is..my electric bike..

The incredible lightness of..
electric biking...
Everyone knows about Amsterdam's biking culture..what everyone might not know is about the Dutch bicycling subclasses, social orders, snobbery and infinite array of bicycling possibilities this highly creative little country has devised to define their lives on two (or three, or four) wheels.
I have been trundling along on my trusty black omafiets since giving my last electric bicycle away to a friend (who deserved it :)), thinking, ah ! I am back to being a regular Amsterdammer , no one can make fun of me now for the damn electric bike  , I'll get super fit and be really happy on my lovely black Oma fiets with brown basket and the sidebags for all other portables, including : bookbags, swimclothes , groceries, dog food, kitchen sinks and , not to forget, dogs themselves.
Though I and the dogs prefer to have them in the front basket,smiling at each other through the canals and dreary weather .
 Since bringing my 14 year old labrador home, the little ones' trips out have stopped. I can't take them out and leave my big angel home alone, it just wouldn't be fair!
So I have been thinking, maybe this summer I'll get the electric bakfiets to get him and the Littles all together to head to the beach..but I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I first got here, I bought a nice, white, trusty modern omafiets, somewhat chic but not completely chic, as I later learned, because it wasn't black.

( it's the little details here in a little country that tell the story :)) with leather handles maybe, a woven basket if you want to be really cute about it. Guys often take the big black version with the bar across, an idea I've often wondered  the wisdom of  as the men have more to lose if they fall off their seats.

Many other versions of the Oma are to be seen; spray painted, very beat up ones that look as if they came from Ye Olde Junkie's fine establishment under the nearest bridge.  That would be , evidently , secret spots around town where you can support the local addict community by buying back your bike that was nicked a week ago for a small sum. Or, if you're lucky, your neighbour's bike, the nice one with the leather handles. I've never been offered a stolen bike for sale, I must look too goody-two-shoes, I feel I have so far thus missed a proper Amsterdammer behavior; riding stolen goods.
Ah well, maybe some day..
But the beat up one is most favoured, a kind of I don't give a damn chic(translates to : please don't steal me, I'm a working man's bike) . Oddly, I think these bikes get stolen more than the nice ones, at least so far, touch wood, my own experience.
Everyone uses two locks , one that clamps the wheel down, and one you use to attach the bike to a pole or a tree , or the nearest British tourist in a drunken stupor on on the corner. Always the effort is made when parking to attach the bike to some object that can not, even with superhuman drug induced adrenalin(sorry to stress this point but it is evidently that crowd that have cultivated this art of bike thievery around here), be lifted off the ground.. I've met so many tourists who have had their bike nicked the first day in town, so tie that puppy down!

If you are a Mum, a chic, or some would say , nouveau riche (here we go again) mum, you've got your self a Bakfiets. This is the Dutch biking world's version of the annoying SUV  bought by a mum who insists she "needs the space" for the one child and three bags of groceries.
Maybe I'm too much of a Californian, though, but I really dig the Bakfiets, it's to me the epitome of Dutch cuteness in design, and I find myself having fantasies of kidnapping one small towheaded Dutch speaking child so I can put it in the bakfiets and be as super chic as the Old South (Out Zuid) mums riding around like queens, to be honest, some of them balancing four and five little towheads ever so gracefully in a giant glorified wooden bucket at the front end of their bike. A fijn talent indeed!

But the old , "real" AMsterdammers hate the Bakfiets, and complain about the N.R. that come from the south of Holland, live in Out Zuid, and fill up entire bike lanes with their "big , stupid, useless bikes". A real Dutchman, they say, just puts the little ones on the back of the bike in a child seat, or on the bar in front of the parent (owww!) or in the basket. THAT is considered  truly chic.

And want to play "Spot the American Expat Mum"?
Look for the REALLY BIG Bakfiets, the one with tricycle formation three wheels,the ones that doesn't give a damn if it takes up the entire bike lane and takes off like a tank with a diesel engine..
all the children , AND the mother, will be wearing helmets. In CLoggy-VIew, this is about as dorky as you can possibly get, thank heaven the majority of (wealthy) expat mothers don't speak more than five words of Dutch and are happily oblivious to  the curses flying over their heads. I met a woman at my gym last month who
1. married a Dutch man, 2. lived here for now thirty years, 3. has Dutch -American children who speak fluent Dutch and go to Dutch school.

She doesn't even know how to say good night in Dutch. This is bad.Really bad. What's worse is she wasn't in the least embarrassed about it!

I was told by a new guy friend at a bar last night, that if I put the dogs in a Bakfiets I would be "talked about in the neighborhood"...for a society known to be so "liberal and forgiving" , the Dutch have rules for absolutely EVERYTHING.  Topic  for a later post, but to begin (to start , at least on the bike) ; do not stick out . Favourite and much repeated Dutch adage" Just be normal, it is strange enough" -means; do not be eccentric or different in a noticeable way to US, or we will think you are weird, make comments, make very rude comments , insult you to your face, kidnap your dog, throw your children in the canal, hang you up and burn you from a post on the Leidsplein on friday night when the moon is full.

So I knew I was heading into tricky water buying a new electric bike- back to the bike, I live in the center , everything is fairly much within a few minutes' riding distance normally, except for the things that really matter! (to me) My best friends both live in Out Zuid, a decent 20 minute ride and can be a witch on the windy Weterinschans in wintertime, pushing against a solid wall of below freezing air to reach the destination, some gezellig bar or elegant joint, where you will be then unlayering levels of sweaty clothes and trying to make the hair decent after having your fresh blow dry squashed in a wool cap.It ain't easy being cute here!
And my school where I go is all the way past the Westerpark, other side of town, a good forty minute ride in the best of times!
I broke my back a few years ago, and it has really been a pain in the neck making it on time to school on Sunday mornings, for reasons I imagine I need not elaborate having to do with the extensive gezellheid of Dutch saturday night  drinking culture but mainly because my darn back doesn't become one piece and not a puzzle till after noon.
I was cutting class and or getting there grumpy or late most of the time, and then got that electric bike- all of a sudden I felt about five years old! They go like the wind!!!

Start peddling and it feels as if the Very Hand of God is pushing you from behind, flying along, passing bewildered teenage Dutch boys who thought you were dust in their shadows.
Brilliant invention, the electric bike. Silent stealthy wonder.
But I gave mine away because a . a friend needed it more than me, and b. I was made fun of for being a junior old fart.  See here, till just recently, only old people rode these things. I think this was an old person's secret actually, because these things rock. No more arriving sweaty and disheveled, now you dismount the bike at destination like a rock star floating out of a Bentley, clean, smiling, hair  in place (ok  I lied, that the bike can't help) . Life is beautiful!
I was denying myself, but today  I bought another...it's a classic Omafiets like my regular one, with wide handlebars that wrap around, a giant bell you can hear a block away, and man it goes like the wind,
strange be damned , I love flying like the wind..