I have already written about the old radio, our first and only record player, and the transition to cassettes. This post is about the medium that followed and was as anticipated as it was short-lived.

Cassettes, thanks to the repeated contact of the tape with the player head, tended to wear down over time. And then there was the analog nature of the players themselves - the belt drive that turned the cassette reel would not maintain its speed of rotation, especially after a trip to the local repair shop, so the tempo would go a little off over time. Not dramatic enough for voices to sound like sped-up cartoon voices but enough for me to tell that it was not the same song that I had heard thousands of times¹.

Compact Discs (CDs) offered a break from all of this. When I started my job, I asked my parents if I could spend a not insignificant portion of my first wage on them. CDs were expensive back then. Before I started splurging on them, we had just a couple at home - cheap T-Series CDs of Brian Silas playing hindi oldies on the piano.

The most common way to play a CD was to pop it into my desktop tower’s CD-ROM drive and play it either using a CD player application on the PC or hit the play button on the drive itself with the headphones plugged right into the CD-ROM drive’s audio jack. Ripping them to the computer’s disk was not something I would start doing till many years later. Space on computer hard disks back then were puny. I have 60x more space on my Apple watch now than what my desktop did back then. Uncompressed CD audio takes a lot of space. This is late 90s so while mp3 format that would compress audio by as much as 10x without perceptible loss in quality was coming up, software to encode + play wasn’t mainstream yet. But even mp3s would take, what I would’ve then considered, too much space on my measly 540 MB hard disk.

Thus my consumption of CDs stayed largely tethered to the desktop. I seem to have given the entire generation of Sony’s Discman a miss. But there was another Sony product that came into my life a few years later via a short detour.

Intel - yes the processor company - made a brief (and in hindsight, ill-informed) foray into consumer hardware like webcams and audio players during early 2000s. My first portable digitial music player was from them. It had 64 MB memory (enough for about an hour of audio encoded at 128kbps). Its shape was apparently inspired by those smooth pebbles one finds by the banks of a river. It had a rubberised body with a belt clip and a transparent faceplate that you could remove and customise (which I did with cutouts from the colored printouts from the office printer). It ran on one AA battery and the limited storage meant I would have to refresh both the battery and the music on it every so often. It sustained me during those brutal hour-long work commutes in Delhi. Someone swiped it from my desk at work one day when I had gone for lunch. It took me while to overcome the devastation and two decades later, the loss still rankles.

I never bothered replacing it.

In the meanwhile, laptops were improving in specs and coming down in prices. Microsoft, my then employer, issued me one at work. The storage on these machines was now approaching gigabytes. One could afford to keep a decent collection of music on one’s hard disk. It wasn’t the sort of portability that a portable music player offered but one no longer had to lug CDs to be able to listen to them. I’d still buy audio CDs but I’d immediately rip them to mp3 files. Or rather wma files - since I was a Microsoft employee and an ardent fanboy at the time and Windows Media Player supported both the format and the act of ‘ripping’ natively.

Microsoft used to (perhaps still do?) organize annual gatherings of employees from their subsidiaries across the world. These were grand, would-fill-a-large-stadium affairs. I was due to attend one in New Orleans² but wasn’t confirmed till quite late. I don’t know if it was my performance, my potential or something as banal as someone else opting out and the travel budget still being available. All I know is that my name was put on the list of attendees and my turn came.

That whole trip is a blur but I remember a few things well. Due to my late confirmation, I was put up in a hotel slightly further away from where everyone was. On the flip side, I had the whole room to myself³. This was the first time I was staying in a hotel room without a window. Oh there was one, but it’d open to a red-brick wall of another building which is as good as not having one. The lack of daylight, fatigue from a long flight and the jetlag meant I crashed immediately⁴. When I woke up, I showered and went out for a walk. It was already dark. Thanks to my jetlag, I must’ve slept through the day. I mustn’t have wandered far because back then there were no smartphones and I was terrible at reading maps. I remember visiting a Virgin music store. They were about to close for the day but I saw a black Sony Net MD player hanging from a shelf in a clear molded plastic packaging, the sort that is an absolute nightmare to open, and on a whim, bought it.

I was drawn to MiniDiscs for their small size. Or some misplaced sense of nostalgia about 3.5 inch floppy discs - at 68×72×5mm vs the floppy’s 93.7×90.0×3.3mm it wasn’t that off size-wise. It was small enough to fit on the palm of your hand. I got interested once Sony launched their Net MD format. An mp3 like compression (ATRAC3) allowed them to squeeze 4-5 hours of music on a single MiniDisc. Sony’s software, as had been the case with software bundled with most consumer electronics of that era that’d connect to a PC, was terrible. But it was functional. And within a few minutes it had helped me transfer Beethoven’s Op. 74 and Op. 95 string quartets onto a MiniDisc. I remember listening to it all day during breaks at the conference. This thing miraculously ran for 50+ hours on a single AA cell.

A couple of years later I upgraded to Sony’s next generation of Mini Discs, the so called ‘High MD’ that allowed 1 GB of storage per disc. That’s about 15 CDs worth of music per disc. I spent a considerable number of weekend afternoons re-organizing my music collection and battled with such important questions as whether I should organize my collection of works of Beethoven by opus or by instruments or if it was ok to put the symphonies together with the piano concertos or to just leave the rest of the disc empty. Truly a life of privilege and leisure⁵.

By this time, both I and Sony were swimming against the tide. The world was moving to iPods and other similar devices. While the original iPod used to have a spinning hard disk, flash storage was now getting cheap enough that devices with several GB were getting common and affordable. Once I got my first Mac, it was only a matter of time before I too moved on to the iPod ecosystem. But that’s for another post…

If you think you have steady hands, try shooting with a zoom lens. Even the slightest quiver gets amplified many times over and ruins your composition. The camera app on iOS 26 does offer some help. At 8x zoom, it shows a tiny thumbnail on the top right corner of your screen with a yellow rectangular frame marking the area you are zoomed into.

It occasionally helps me find my way back to my original framing, though usually it comes in my way, especially when the framing is tight.

The reach that 200mm offers is quite stunning. In most historic cities in the Netherlands, where the buildings are full of colourful brick patterns, gable stones and other details, it is helping me see things I would’ve otherwise never caught. Like this statue of a man leaning from the gabled roof of a house. I noticed it only last week even though I must’ve walked past it hundreds of times over the past 14 years I’ve been in Amsterdam.

And even the boring, modern buildings present interesting compositional possibilities…

Now the cons:

1. The images at the telephoto end are somewhat on the softer side.
2. At 8x zoom the auto focus struggles to focus on the subject if the background is a lot brighter.
3. The bokeh doesn’t even come close to touching what you’d get from an SLR body.
4. And this sort of reach from within just a few mm thick phone body will surely have privacy implications.

While the first three should gradually disappear as hardware and software improve, I fear that the last one is something we’ll just have to learn to live with as a society.

The last time I experienced diesel fumes at a station in Europe was in Scotland in 2018. The wife and I had taken a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and had disembarked on a platform where an engine belching burnt diesel fumes stood. That, coupled with poor airflow, had made me feel quite sick.

My childhood memory of train stations in India is the odour of burnt coal mingled with the stench of piss from the dirty public urinals. I realised what that ‘train station’ smell really was quite late in life. For the longest time, it was a pungent but not an altogether repugnant smell - for my brain had come to associate it with the excitement of traveling in trains.

Clearly, I’ve grown soft.

Anyway, coming back to the electrification project here - it was originally slated to finish in 2020 but has been mired in bureaucratic delays. To quote the article:

De provincie en het rijk ruzieden over wie wat zou betalen. Vorig jaar werd de aanbestedingsprocedure stopgezet omdat er een tekort aan materialen was.

The province and the government argued about who would pay for what. Last year, the tender procedure was stopped because there was a shortage of materials.

Apparently, it costs Arriva - the operator of trains on this line - some 20-27 million Euros each year to keep these outdated diesel engines running. So they definitely have financial incentives to get a move on. The project will cost 358 million Euros and the first electric train should run on this route towards the end of 2027.

The electrification of this stretch still leaves about 400 km of the Dutch railway network reliant on diesel engines. Worse, as of this year, there are no plans to electrify it.

The first one was to Het Twikse Twiske yesterday. It’s a small nature reserve just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. We had discovered it a couple of years ago completely by chance. We were having breakfast at a cafe in Noord one day and were looking for a place to go for a long ride². I had pulled up the map on my phone, seen this stretch of green surrounding a water body and we had decided to aim our bikes in that general direction.

We started from home around 16:45. We biked to Pontsteiger to try and catch the ferry to NDSM Werf and managed to board it with just 45 seconds to spare³.

By the time we were at Het Twikse Twiske, it was the golden hour. The trees were still leafless and the tall grass that surrounds the many waterways there, was dry and brown. It was a dreamy, monochromatic landscape complete with a windmill and stately, waterside Dutch houses.

The second ride was to Haarlem today. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been to Haarlem since I got my e-bike. It’s a comfortable 20kms (on e-bike) away from Amsterdam and the route the wife has made for us takes us along water bodies and farms and through quiet parks and a vast stretch of nature that the maps label as ‘recreational area’. Part of the route is parallel to a train track and a road. It’s perfectly normal for a train and a car to woosh past us while a plane headed from or to Schiphol zooms overhead. We marvel at the multimodality of traffic in this country and try not to race the other modes⁴.

We parked our bikes at a bike stand right at the outskirts of the city under the watchful gaze of 14th century Amsterdamse Poort and made a beeline for a place in Botermarkt that serves delicious falafel rolls⁵.

We love walking through the city that the wife rightly characterizes as “less crazy Amsterdam”. It is at once familiar and new. We walked through the streets and finally sat down for a coffee at a sunny café by Haarlem’s river-canal Binnen Spaarne. The café’s sleepy house cat wasn’t averse to being petted by customers.

I hit the 500 km milestone on our ride home. The wife, who has had her bike for much longer and regularly bikes to work, narrowly missed hitting 2500 km. If her commute doesn’t do it, I am sure we could use this as an excuse for a ride next weekend.

We took the purple line from the M. G. Road station towards Challaghatta, changed over to the green line at the Nagaprabhu Kempegowda (Majestic) station towards Silk Institute and got down at the Krishna Rajendra Market station. From there the palace was a short (5-10 min) walk.

We needed tickets to enter the palace, but there wasn’t a booth nearby selling the paper kind. We had to buy them online by scanning the QR code printed on a placard affixed to the entry gate. There were a couple of liveried guards at the gate who scanned them from our mobile phone and let us in.

From the gate, a footpath with two small lush green patches on either side of it leads you to the palace. The airy, arched hallway we stood in front of was grand. A man at its entrance had just poured some water on the floor and was scouring it with a broom with the fervour of Lady Macbeth trying to rid herself of her imagined bloodstains.

We were visiting on a working day around 10:00 AM. It was a good time to visit. We pretty much had the whole palace to ourselves.

Behind the palace was a small courtyard that housed a defunct fountain. At the moment it was merely a big, dry, rectangular, concrete hole in the ground a foot or two deep. It wasn’t particularly well marked. Someone walking without paying attention could fall in and hurt themselves, but I am probably letting my newly acquired European sensibilities come in the way here.

Just past the palace’s perimeter was a decrepit building that houses a school. The school was in session. Despite the din of the traffic, we could hear a chorus of children learning something by rote in one of the classes…

I retreated back into the palace hallway to admire the rows of ornate, wooden columns supporting the scalloped arches.

There are staircases at both ends of this hallway that you are allowed to climb. These led us to a small, brightly decorated room that was connected to a gallery on the first floor.

A couple of arched openings on either sides of the gallery lead to balconies. Access to them had been blocked by a wooden barrier. It had been tied to the columns from two sides so that people won’t move it aside and try to step onto the balconies.

While Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace is definitely grand, it is not very palatial (say like Mysore Palace). Meaning, after spending a few minutes, we had seen everything there was to see here.

I was glad that I could finally visit a longtime favourite of Bangalore tourists and yet I also left feeling a little sad. There were signs of wear and water damage throughout the palace. Could the restoration and upkeep be better? Sure. Though to be fair, wood can be a notoriously difficult material to maintain and restore - especially when it is exposed to the elements all year round. Short of building a climate-controlled superstructure around it, what are they to do?

Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music

I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling.

It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016. That said, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to compile detailed liner notes like I was doing till 2019.

I am now in the 3rd year of learning Spanish on Duolingo¹ and if I am to trust their grading, about to start approaching CEFR B1 proficiency. This has allowed me to appreciate the lyrical beauty of a lot of Spanish songs I heard this year. And so the 2024 playlist is a tad heavier in music from Spanish speaking parts of the world than the years before.

While algorithmically created playlists by Spotify - both their discovery weekly as well as the newly introduced ‘daylist’, were a big source of new music, I continue to discover new music and artists through other sources, like TV shows² and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

Lastly, there are a couple of songs in the playlist that I want to give a special nod to.

1. Ryan Downey’s ‘Running’ (track #1 in the playlist) got plenty of play in our house - what a stunning voice. For some reason, he reminds me of Leonard Cohen.

2. The other one is Plantar un Bosque (track #12 in the playlist) - mostly for the quirky lyrics that could well be an exchange between me and my wife about me bringing in too many plants into the living room:

Yo te voy a plantar un bosque
I am going to plant you a forest

Ay, si lloras, por si lloras
Oh, if you cry, just in case you cry

Tú me lo riegues
You’ll water it for me

Y poco a poco
And little by little

Gota a gota
Drop by drop

Los ruiseñores vendrán a cantarte
The nightingales will come to sing to you

A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all.

A somewhat related episode from that time comes to mind.

I was in my twenties and living in Bangalore. I had just begun to recognise my love for reading and western classical music. I remember having particularly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. This being a book about members of a string quartet¹, was full of references to Western Classical music. At one point in the book, the protagonist struggles to locate the recording of an obscure work by Beethoven. Apparently, there weren’t any easy to find recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 104² - neither in the book nor in real life. Fortunately for me, due to many requests by other readers of the book, Decca had already issued a 2 CD set with a compilation of all the pieces from the book in 2000 - including the elusive Op. 104.

Cover of the CD companion to An Equal Music

For all the toil it took to obtain the recording, I had mostly forgotten about it. I am not sure where I bought the CD. A search of my Amazon order history from those years turned up nothing. Amazon wasn’t in India then but I would routinely get things³ shipped to friends living in the US and pick them up whenever I’d visit them. So the CD might have come from a physical shop. Either one of the many CD/DVD shops at Schiphol⁴ I used to visit during those long layovers on the way to the US from India or the shop on Church Street in Bangalore that specialised in Jazz and Classical recordings. I no longer have the CD with me. I gave it away (like all my other CDs) when we left Bangalore. 1-04 III. Menuetto_ Quasi allegro [String Quintet in C Minor, Op. 104].mp3 dated 06 Feb 2011, is now playing in the background as I write this post.

I don’t think I particularly enjoyed the work or even listened to it more than a couple of times. I did use to enjoy the piano trio the work is derived from. It had certainly been novel to listen to it rearranged for a completely different ensemble. I was also going through a Beethoven phase in my life. I was compiling a playlist of all his works one opus at a time. In 2010, I even registered beethovenfans.com with the intent of featuring my favourite recordings of each opus. Both pursuits remain unfinished.

These days you can just stream the entire CD on Spotify and I am sure on any other streaming music service of your choice. Freeing music distribution from the constraints of physical media might have been one of the best things that the internet did.

Mallorca is a popular tourist destination so there are several direct flights from Amsterdam. Upon landing at the Palma de Mallorca airport we realised that while Ubers are not banned outright, there is a 30 minute cool off period before you can order one. The wife quickly spotted a bus that’d go close to our hotel and ordered me to use my newly acquired Spanish¹ skills to get us the tickets. I ran, assembled Spanish words into some semblance of a coherent sentence, repeated it twice in my head and blurted:

Me : Boletos para dos adultos por favor. (tickets for two adults)
Bus Driver : Si. Paga en efectivo. (yes, pay in cash)
Me (thrilled at having been understood and having understood what the driver said): ¿Cuanto? ¿Diez euros?
Bus Driver : Takes my money and hands me two tickets.

Now I am sure a driver assigned to a route that busses hapless tourists from the airport into the city would have managed that interaction in English just fine. But still, a frisson of excitement ran through me at having pulled my first real-world task off in a new language. The wife had already boarded the bus and found us a spot to stand with our suitcases. I walked to her - tickets proudly in hand, beaming cheek to cheek.

Mallorca has some picturesque beaches but we are not beach people. As in we don’t fancy lying in the sand and taking a dip in the sea. We were staying at a hotel in the beach-y neighbourhood (Playa de Palma) for the first three days only to be able to take long walks along the coast and catch some sun.

We were at our hotel by 5 pm. The sun wouldn’t set till around 8:30 pm. This left us ample time to grab a quick bite and go for a walk along the beach. The sunset that evening was beautiful.

We woke up next morning to the sort of clear, sunny day on which they hoist a green flag over the boxy, yellow lifeguard stations at the beach in Mallorca to signal that the sea is safe for a swim.

After the breakfast at our hotel, we followed the beach south - always keeping left to the short perimeter wall along the beach built probaby to keep the sand from blowing over onto the footpath. When the beach ended at a marina, a road took us to higher, rockier ground. Several pine trees were growing here. The view of the Balearic sea from here was stunning. Many sailboats lingered here simply enjoying the day.

Lunch was at an Italian restaurant the wife looked up. We sat outdoors enjoying the sun. After all the cold, rainy days that had led up to this trip, it was a novel feeling. The houses in the neighbourhood were painted in earthly shades of ochre and peach. Their slanting terracotta tiled roofs, window overhangs and arched entryways created a mesmerising effect that reminded me of the Monument Valley games I was so taken in with several years ago.

On our way back the sun was shining brightly and this small church on the way to our hotel looked made it look a little other-worldly. But then churches do cocern themselves with all things other-wordly.

This was all the exertion my body could take so it was time for a siesta. We slept a couple of hours and woke up feeling rested. We stepped out for another walk along the beach, this time in a north-westerly direction. Not surprisingly, most of Mallorca’s main beach - Playa de Palma, is lined with beach resorts and hotels. Their architecture is more or less similar. It is all about maximising the view of the ocean and parcelling it into tiny lots you can rent to tourists from sun-starved countries such as ours.

There were also these semi-permanent numbered structures spaced along the entire stretch of the beach that would turn into popup bars serving juices, cocktails, beer and coffee during the day. They definitely add a festive feel to the beach.

The air was a little hazier than yesterday so we were expecting the sunset to be less spectacular than yesterday but when the moment arrived, it still left us stunned.

Our ride took us through open fields, along stately farmhouses, over quaint wooden bridges, and even on dykes.

A drawbridge

This must surely be the narrowest two-way cycling lane we’ve ever ridden on:

A narrow cycling path and a wooden bridge

We saw no one for miles at end - so for the kind of traffic these bike paths were serving, they were plenty.

Pictures from Marken:

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

View of Markermeer

Views of Markermeer

Sparrows

I was really happy¹ to see sparrows in Marken. While you occasionally hear a sparrow or two chirping in our neighbourhood on a quiet afternoon, I hadn’t seen so many of them together in a long time.

On our way to Marken, we had taken a couple of lengthy detours as we were feeling a little adventurous - though a couple of times our hands were also forced by ongoing repairs to the dykes in the area. It was also very windy on our way back. I struggled to hit 25 kmph even with the maximum assist my e-bike had to offer. The result was that the wife ran out of battery some time before she reached home and I barely scraped by. As someone who has never driven and is on his first vehicle powered by an external energy source, range anxiety is certainly a new feeling I am having to welcome.

Within a few days of learning to bike, it became an act as natural as walking. But I still had a mental block that kept me from biking to work every day. That my commute involved cutting through the picturesque, historic canal ring of Amsterdam didn’t help. The route was meant to be savoured each day on foot, not rushed through on a bike.

A few years ago I landed a job that finally got me biking seriously. Fourteen kilometres a day - to my office and back. This was before the pandemic, so five days at office were still the norm. It was the fastest and cheapest way to get to work. Barring inclement weather or the occasional bouts of laziness, biking became my preferred way to commute. This was the first time the thought of getting an e-bike crossed my mind. Vanmoof had just started to rise in popularity here. We both knew friends who had purchased Vanmoof’s latest models and spoke favourably of their purchase. The wife and I even took test rides. But the clunky gear change mechanism of their then state of the art model didn’t sit well with either of us³. The lack of a detachable battery which would necessitate bringing the entire bike to our tiny apartment for charging was another factor that put us off. The other e-bikes of that time, especially from the staple Dutch brands (Batavus, Gazelle etc.) had felt clunky and heavy and so we did without one for the next few years.

All those days of working from home during the pandemic broke my cycling habit. My next jobs have again been a lot closer to our home. While biking is still the fastest way to get to the office, biking just 3-4 km somehow feels cheating. I do bike on some days but walking is my preferred way to get to work. It’s a 30-35 minute commute on foot and I get to take pictures, listen to a podcast or generally wool-gather.

Thanks to global warming, there is now at least a 6 month window (I’d say May-Oct) when cycling in Amsterdam is very pleasant. There are several small towns 15-20 kms from Amsterdam that make for great day trip destinations on your bike. We’d do one or two of these trips each summer but our legs would be so sore the next day that our resolution at the start of the summer to do these biking trips more regularly would fizzle out.

The wife again started considering getting an e-bike seriously a couple of years ago. I spotted a billboard⁴ for an up and coming direct to consumer Belgian e-bike brand called Cowboy and told her about it. Shortly after seeing the ad, we started spotting Cowboy bikes more regularly on the road. They weren’t available in bike shops but you could book a test ride on their website and someone would come to your home with one. Many people at the wife’s workplace already owned one. They spoke highly of the bike’s quality and Cowboy’s service. The wife booked a test ride and knew that she was getting one the moment it ended. The bike checked all the boxes for her - it was light, had a detachable battery and the step-through frame was the right size for her height - in a country where the average height is 182 cm (~6ft) that’s not a given. We ordered it online. It arrived a few days later and after minimal assembly, she was all set.

I took a ride too but hadn’t fully bought into the idea of an e-bike just yet. Besides, we didn’t want to put both our eggs in one basket - I’d keep looking for another brand.

Getting an e-bike really opened up distances for her. On weekends she’d casually ride down to Haarlem (a 40 km round trip) or Monnickendam (that’s another 32 km for a round trip) and still have energy to go to work the next day. On the handful of occasions I accompanied her, we’d either cut the ride short or I’d follow her from a great distance, out of breath and knees creaking from trying to keep up with her against 50 kmph wind.

Yes, the Netherlands is a flat country but even on a fine summer day, the wind can easily overcompensate for the lack of a climb uphill. But let’s not use the wind as an excuse here. Riding a manual bike for distances of 70-80 km over a weekend, even on a perfectly still weekend, would easily divest me of any delusions about my physical fitness. Paradoxically, I also worried about losing whatever fitness levels I did have by depending on e-bike - the mind saw an e-bike as a fancy crutch.

And so I held back for two more years. Perhaps because I have been ripe for a full-blown midlife crisis, a part of my brain started entertaining this fantasy where instead of an e-bike, I would get one of those light, carbon-fibre racing bikes. Surely, through this marriage of precision engineering and my brute force I would then be able to easily keep up with (and even fly past) my wife on her e-bike.

For the past three weeks we’ve been getting days that have been so perfect and idyllic that I’ve felt as if we are living inside an advertisement for summers. Naturally, the wife has been making the most of her e-bike and I’ve been accompanying trailing her on my manual bike. A ride back from one long trip where the wind knocked a good 5 km/h from my average speed, I finally opened up to the idea of getting an e-bike.

The wife who has been scouting the right e-bike for me ever since she got hers, couldn’t stand the thought of frittering another beautiful summer away and insisted that I go for another test ride. She even located a shop really close to our home that I could visit on a random Monday I had taken off from work. I opted to give Tenways CGO800S a shot. I took it along my office route which cuts through Amsterdam’s canal belt, has uneven traffic and the bridges over the canals present a short but decent incline. My test ride felt effortless, even joyful. I knew right then that this was it.

I have now had it for two weeks and we’ve already clocked over 120 kilometres. I had read that e-bike riders cover longer distances and so get same or more exercise as those riding manual bikes. This certainly rings true so far.

At 23 kg (including the battery) the bike is not much heavier than my current manual one of 19 kg. It also rides smoothly when the battery assistance is off. I’ve covered long stretches without battery assistance - only summoning it during periods of strong winds, when I need to catch a break after a particularly long stretch. Or when I’ve needed a little extra acceleration - for example when the traffic light turns green just as you have braked. Not ever having driven anything where an external force propels me (I don’t know how to drive or ride a scooter), I was worried I’d get addicted to speed. And while I admit it is thrilling to go from 0 to 25 km/h in under 10 seconds of light pedalling, it actually makes me lot less annoyed at having to stop for tourists crossing the bike paths heedlessly⁵. Say goodbye to road rage, say hello to traffic tranquillity?

Anyway, I hope to use the battery sparingly. I think of it like Mario stumbling upon a super star - a rare thing, makes you invincible for a short time and you are still liable to getting destroyed if you act rashly⁶.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the giant statue of the famous delftware kissing couple near the Zaandam ferry station. A 13 km round trip taken casually after a full day of work. When you have an e-bike, you are always looking to squeeze a ride in.

A giant statue of the Kissing Couple