I mentioned that the Danes were riding those lovely big euro-bicycles all around Copenhagen? (Mostly these big sturdy ones -- but I saw one guy with a bike that he folded up to the size of a laptop and bring it into a sushi restaurant for lunch).
BIke parking areas like this one in front of the train station were everywhere -- just writhing hives of bikes. But look closely... and almost none of them are locked. And the ones that are? Aren't locked TO anything, just have a wee little chain around the front wheel so no one rides them off.
This is the most foreign part to me. And I see it completely differently after reading this clever piece in Toronto Life last month about Igor Kenk, the crazy bike thief, that suggested that he was actually *hoarding* bikes in prep for some dystopic future where they'd be the new capital. In that context, I couldn't help but see these free-wheeling bikes in Copenhagen as some pre-lapsarian world of optimism.
When I wasn't busy feeling stumpy and SHORT and not-blonde, that is.
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