Biking: The ULTIMATE London Experience

T-Dawg's Bike.

Sunday morning found me up for god knows what reason at about 8 AM. This was after another fun night of dancing with dorm friends and getting to know new people. I had heard from our bartender that there is a "Market" on Sundays on Brick Lane where bikes are for sale. After googling this road and finding it to be about 45 minutes walk away, I grabbed some cash and ran out the door. The walk was good, half-awake as I was. I had some groovy I-tunes to carry me, and a hand-drawn map of poor quality to guess the way. Thank god for boy scout training, as I definitely felt like I was wandering through some sort of eerie wilderness. London is dead at 8 AM on Sunday morning- rather quiet, somewhat lonely.

Dreary Sunday Morning in London

After wandering around for a bit, I discovered a market not quite on brick lane, but it had the right sort of people milling around in it. I wandered through the crowd with an eerie sense of deja vu, like some dream I once had. About a quarter mile into the market, there were the bikes. I was pleased to find that they were mostly crappy, and all very cheap. I don't doubt that many of them were stolen and had made their way into the possession of the market via somewhat crepuscular methods, but I chose the cheapest, crappiest bike I could find that still looked like it would hold up for a year. The bike was 25 pounds (about 50 bucks) and I had to re-tread the tire on the back for another 6 pounds. Not a shabby price! I got a cheap bike pump for two pounds, and a helmet for 10 pounds. Whole shabang: about 90 dollars. What took me 45 minutes to walk to was only about 10 minutes to ride back. I was incredibly stoked, and incredibly tired. I ended up taking a nap, and then grabbed a personal yoga session in my new gym about 2 mins. bike distance from the Hall.

Catherine: The Gypsy-like bike-selling lady.
She was actually really nice.. I think I looked
kind of like the people in the bike stall though-
customers kept asking me how much the bikes
cost. Shaved heads must be a hooligan thing :P

The new gym is awesome! They have a huge aerobic room that I can use whenever there aren't classes. There were some odd people who came in during my yoga practice, but their presence actually helped me to focus on what I was doing. I came back to the dorm, got about 1.5 hours sleep, and then re-awoke to make my way down for the official Roseberry meet and greet party.

This is My Gym. It's expensive, but it ROCKS!

Never have I met so many people at once! There must have been 200+ of us milling about, introducing eachother, swapping phone numbers, stories, majors, etc.. What an eclectic bunch as well! The word COSMOPOLITIAN stamps itself on my mind in big black letters. Cool people from Greece, Sri Lanka, Jordan (all the Jordanians look alike-- something they call the Jordan Frown), the USA (very few of us actually), India, Malaysia, China, France, Germany, Belgium.. have I left anything out? Oh yeah, a few Russians and Canadians too. As the night grew late, I started to realize how very lucky I am to be able to have this experience- it was incredible to meet so many new faces, and to hear so many new stories/ cultures/ points of view. This place, so long as one remains open, will be an incredible experience.

I had one really interesting meeting late at night right before I went to sleep- an Indian fellow introduced himself as Shrek, and knew my name before I even gave it to him! Apparently the story of my bike had made its way around the Hall, and as I write this report on Monday evening, others have come up to me asking me where I found it and how it rides. I'm a biking celebrity! Shrek is a really cool guy from Bangladesh, which is apparently near Mysore. He'd heard of Gyana-Nana-Barrati, my old yoga guru, and told me that if I ever want to travel to India, most especially the Mysore region, he'd be happy to help me out. He's doing his masters in some sort of Systems Management-- he plans to take the knowledge back to his city and .. well.. make lots of money, I suppose. And no, his real name isn't Shrek, but a lot of the Indian people over here give out nicknames, as their full names are rather hard to remember..

Students Chillen in the Halls-- foot massages are good!

Malik, the Trance DJ who spins at the Ministry of Sound.

Monday was mostly a day of chilling, sleeping, and catching up. I met a few cool people and went out to breakfast with some of the students, and took a bike ride to the LSE where I got hopelessly lost, but had a really good time. London streets are a lot of fun to ride in. You have to stay extremely aware of what you're doing, but once you're up to speed, you're basically a slow-moving car. The coolest thing is that at stoplights you can squeeze up through all of the cars and take your place at the front of the line. Motorcycles are too big to do this- only bikes.

In London, bikes rule.

Cheers.