Bicycle, bicycle

This post is a tale of quest and fulfillment.

Soon after arriving in Freiburg, I started yearning for a bicycle. Since I can get around perfectly well with my Semesterticket for the trams, this whim wasn't really utilitarian in origin. I'll attribute it partly to the desire for belonging (since it feels like everyone here cycles -- bicycles on streets here frequently outnumber cars, and the front of my building looks like this) and partly to the hope of improving my self-image by association (since cycling's so picturesque here -- professors with books; housewives with baskets of groceries; girls in long coats, hair streaming helmetless in the wind).

Anyway, rational or not, I wanted a bike, but the secondhand shops I visited quoted me terrifying prices. I resigned myself to a stable and comfortable transportational existence on the Straβenbahnen -- and then heard by chance last week that there was going to be a municipal bicycle auction that Saturday in Müllheim, a tiny agricultural-centre town twenty kilometres south of Freiburg.

So, very early that Saturday, I headed along the main Mannheim-Basel train line down to Müllheim. There were plenty of bikes, presumably rescued from the clutches of gangs of bicycle-stealing gangsters. Caught up in the exhiliration of my first real-life auction and the excitement of finding prices a tenth of the ones in shops and the optimism that results from a general ignorance of possible pitfalls, I quickly obtained a solid-looking green specimen, and then headed back to Freiburg.

It was only later that I discovered that the thing had no brakes. More precisely, it had brakes, but the brake-wire had snapped, or been cut, so that pulling the brake-lever had no effect. At any rate, it was not really a bicycle, but rather a thing that had the potential to become one.

I put the almost-bicycle in the sheds out front of my residence, and forgot about it in the excitement of first classes.

Today, in the lecture-free Friday afternoon which is a delightful feature of my studies here, I got around to paying it some attention again, and took it in to a shop I'd heard of through the grapevine. The shop was said to be cheap, which was what attracted me to it. And indeed it was. For it turned out to be essentially just a large, well-stocked workshop, that anyone can use for a trivial hourly rate, called a bicycle "collective" because you do the repairs yourself, with help (in my case, lots of it) from the wise people in charge. It was in a courtyard off the main street, squished in with a community art studio and a secondhand-clothing shop and suchlike hippy-type businesses, and it had that familiar rather alternative atmosphere that's generated among people who really love their bicycles.

It was delightfully full. The other customers were all under 35, otherwise seemingly a random sampling of Freiburg's population. I spent an hour and a half replacing the wire and lever of my brake, feeling as if I was being initiated into true German-ness, and then cycled home.