Bicycle Postcard

I almost never take photo's. There's not one post you can find with a photograph taken by myself. Sure, there's lots of screenshots and some light editing in GIMP by my hand, but somehow I almost never feel the urge or need to shoot a picture of life.

Sometimes I regret that, especially knowing how memory tends to re-shape images stored there from the past. I think I know the faces of my friends from long ago, but I know that when I see a picture from someone I haven't seen for decades, what I see is almost never exactly what I remember; my mental image doesn't correspond with reality as made eternal on photo-sensitive paper. I should make more photos really.

So last week I took some photos at work and I discovered something funny: when you take pictures with a camera (I used the one on my mobile as I don't own a real camera), you look at things differently! First I thought "why take a photo when I see this every day", but then I saw how stupid that thought is; it's normal to me and it's normal now. I change every second, as does everybody, so tomorrow I'm not the same man as I am today. There's been so much changes in the world during my life; the neighborhood where I grew up still has the same streets, houses and gardens, but I don't recognize it anymore. It is I that have changed.

Photos don't only keep track of the changes in the world you're part of, it keeps track of the changes in yourself too, and I don't mean the self-portraits :-) The pictures are from my hometown of Groningen, the Netherlands, at the place where I work near the central train station. I don't know where you come from, dear reader, but here the main mode of transport is the bicycle. There is more place for parking bicycles then there is for cars; on these pictures there's only the small bicycle parking lot as the really big one is underground. The Netherlands is a real bicyclist's heaven; a lot of the infrastructure and city-logistics are aimed specifically at the two-wheeled pedal-machines.

And I really like that. If I had taken pictures of my hometown throughout the years, they's show a gradual development towards a less car-friendly and more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly place. The city is now full of speed-bumps and roundabouts to slow cars down, and parking cars has been made more expensive. Parking bicycles on the other had is a breeze and completely free, as shown in the above picture. The inner-city is almost unreachable by car as the streets with the major shops and warehouses are reachable by foot (and sometimes by bike) only. But you don't have to go to the inner-city; every neighborhood has its own shopping center and supermarket, so groceries and other essentials can almost always be reached within walking distance. This is so different from what I've seen in America, where everything is built with the assumption that everyone owns a car.

The Central Train Station depicted above is but one example of the extensive public transportation infrastructure in my hometown and most cities in The Netherlands, as well as the rest of Europe. Our cities have very few roads and many streets, with roads built exclusively for cars and streets built for slow traffic, like pedestrians and bicyclists. For a better explanation about the difference, and how they interact, watch the below linked video that compares the infrastructure of Amsterdam to the broken infrastructure of many American cities, where everything is aimed at car ownership.

Well, that's it for today my friends; I can't stay up as late as usual because I have an early morning appointment, in a couple of hours. I can't leave without expressing my gratitude to you however; I thank you for stopping by my blog today and hope to see you back here tomorrow as I try to keep up my schedule of one post per day. Time constraints have resulted in a bit of an unfocused mess of a post today, for which I apologize. I do hope you'll be back tomorrow, and I'll try to make more time and do better.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!