Biking in Amsterdam

Lucca (Italy), morning

It is my blog's birthday. Not today maybe, but I started it in May last year.
This morning I was thinking about one of my experiences in Amsterdam. I got the feeling, living there, that mainly tourists bike downtown Amsterdam (I mean really downtown, in the core of the city). You can see lot of tourists with the rented bike trying to survive to the tram lines and to the crowd biking around.

I used my bike a lot to move around in Amsterdam, but I normally preferred to walk downtown. I brought my old bike to Amsterdam when I moved there. However, after a few weeks, one day, coming out from work, I found the bike completely destroyed and lot of pieces missing. I then fortunately had the chance to borrow another bike. Another weird bike.....to break instead of using the breaks near the handlebar, I needed to move the pedals back...and then the bike would stop immediately. I have to admit that at first, that mechanism is not so obvious, especially when you bike in the rain and you also have an umbrella to hold. One day, while I was baking back from my pilates course, I biked on a bridge and I saw a Japanese tourist (not really practical with biking) coming right in my direction. I had a bit of speed got it going down to the bridge and to avoid him, my first impulse was to break with the breaks on the handlebar.....unfortunately my bike didn't have them, so I ran straight into that poor Japanese man, who looking really scared started to yell at me something (for sure not nice) in Japanese.

I have to say that after that experience I got much much better with breaking pedaling back.