Bicycle Weekend

Having a bike is pretty much essential to living here.  Most people don't own cars (although you wouldn't know it based on the ridiculous amount of traffic I got stuck in yesterday) and the city is designed so that each neighborhood basically has everything people need within walking distance (post office, pharmacy, banks, restaurants, markets, schools, hair salons, etc).  Since we didn't have a bike at first, we had grown accustomed to walking to the places in our neighborhood we visit regularly (school, market, wal-mart, etc).  But let's be honest--it's a lot nicer when you don't have to carve out 15 minutes to walk to the store and 15 more minutes to walk back and instead can trade in that 30 minutes for a 5 minute bike ride. 

We were stoked when a couple weeks ago an American friend mentioned he had a ton of bikes lying around that friends had left when they went back to the States, and we could have one!  (Cultural note:  it is against the law to buy/sell a used bike in our city, part of the government's effort to crack down on bike theft.  But's that's another post about what it's like to live in a low-trust society.)

So, Adam got a bike, and life for him became a lot faster and broader (since he could now travel twice the distance in the same amount of time as before).  It also meant that he got to go to the store more since he could get there and back faster than me.  Katie's been thrilled to experience life as a truly local child whenever she gets to ride on the back of the bike.  Don't worry, grandparents, we're on the look-out for bike helmets (which are strangely hard to come by despite this being such a biker-ful city...I almost said biker-friendly but it's nothing of the sort). 

We're especially in need of a bike helmet for Katie since she got a new bike today!  It seems that all the kids her age around our complex have them (they train 'em young), and we're glad for Katie to have something to do outside besides wander around and get dirty and complain about the playground being boring. 

I entitled this post "Bicycle Weekend" because tomorrow is my day to get a bike of my own!  Hooray for life in the fast lane!  Caroline's not getting left out either...most of the kids her age ride little tricycles or scoot trucks around.  We mostly want to keep her from doing this (see left) everytime we go outside.  (What you don't see are the stares of the grandmas around us who can't believe that I'm letting her do this.)  We were going to buy her one this weekend until some other friends told us they had one we could have.  So, all four McCullochs will soon have wheels...I'll be sure to get some pics of all of us cruising the town.