from london with love

hello hello! (that’s two hello’s, one from each of us.) we are reunited in London – and have been since last Thursday – but we’ve been too busy hijinking to post. here’s some of the things we’ve been doing:

setting up our bikes all ready to transport us around london, seeing a honkingly good clown/klezmer show, playing with babies, juggling, cirque-it circus skillshare playtime, teaching ourselves to swing dance from sketchy youtube videos, and baking bread!

yum! tara wants to give you bread.

 

Tweed Run

I’m a little dissapointed I only just found out about this, but as my bike isn’t single or fixed gear, I wouldn’t have been part of it. The pictures of the event are truly great! Only in London would people dress in tweed to ride bicycles. Sigh.

Though I am off to my first-ever ‘official’ Critical Mass ride tomorrow!

**days later**

Critical Mass is amazing. Apart from a Critical-Mass inspired Palestine solidarity ride in the Valley last spring (see the adorable  shaky vid I made of it here), I’ve never actually been to a full-scale, urban ride. As a London biker, it was empowering to be in the majority for once, forcing traffic to pay attention and make concessions for our speed and size. To be one of two hundred bikes surrounding a single car, rather than the one bike being squeezed off the road by two hundred passing cars was exhilarating – not to mention being able to bike at my own pace, and in the middle of the road, in Leicester Square!

Also, the experience was so much more social than riding in a car can ever be -chatting to other riders, chanting, singing along to the songs played on the bike-mounted sound systems (yeah, they played Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT). Not being enclosed by metal makes you vulnerable in more than the physical sense. I made friends, and smiled at passerby, and learnt how to dance on a bike… it was practically three hours of pedaling before we broke up, a bit chilly and a bit sore, but oh so worth it!