Traditions

What sort of tradition? That of doing a gigantic bike trip over the May holidays! Last year took me to France and England, where I spent more time on trains than on two wheels. The opposite this time, and I write to you now in a totally spent and reflective state. There has been so much that has happened to me in the last nine days I hardly know what to mention and what to glaze over, so stick with me here. 

The setup for long rides- not so glamourous, secondhand and loved, but it works!

The first leg of this trip was officially sponsored by the HZ Green Office using euros from an Erasmus+ grant they'd received to send students on foreign exchanges with sustainability in mind. Our "mission" was to travel to Valenciennes, France to join a protest-march along the River Scheldt. (one group of activists is walking the entire length of the stream to raise awareness of its terrible water quality) All of this was on the condition that we make lots of pictures and videos to document how much fun travelling by bike is.

So it was an all-expenses paid cycling holiday for myself and three friends! I left Middelburg at 4:00PM on April 23rd and wouldn't see it again until 6:00PM on May 1st. The first stop was Ghent, where we stayed in a very swanky hostel right in the city center. The view out our window says it all: 

Enough dull colored stone to make the architects of Oxford jealous. 

One of my better selfies (taken from a moving bike, mind you!) and a view out the window. 

From the ride to Ghent: squint and it looks like Minnesota! Maybe with a few more bike paths.

That night in Ghent we investigated an unusual Wednesday-night festival near the university. It's a huge student-city, but none of us were expecting to find a crowd of several thousand watching football matches, drinking beer, and nodding listlessly to the techno beat. It was actually quite a fun time, and since it was a school night things wrapped up at 10:00. Belgium... what a country! 

The next day we continued on south. Flanders, as the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium is known, has 65% of the population but just 45% of the land area. So it's never far between towns, and there's always some factory, port, or barn to break up the quaint country streets and lanes. I was in charge of navigation, not making pictures, so most of our documentation is on the "good" camera, borrowed from the HZ in an incredible display of trust in us students. (at the time of writing I'm not sure what has become of it) Thus the drought of pictures here. 

We did have to cross this stream where the bridge was out. A nice piece of problem-solving and teamwork. And we didn't even fall in. 

Everyone getting ready to ride again. Left to right: Dominik, Ayden, and Raphael. From Hungary, Thailand, and France respectively. An international gang!

Most of our time in Tournai, the first French-speaking city of the trip, was spent eating and sleeping. Again, it was the city hostel for our accommodations.  From this glance it seems like a nice enough place, better than most cities we passed through. (that is to say, not so industrial!) Raphael speaks fluent French and this was more useful than I could've imagined: the Walloons, much unlike the Flemings, do not make much use of English. 

Big churches, cobbled streets, very typical. We ate at an "American Burger" restaurant, and I wisely got a salad. My experience in European cuisine has taught me this much. 

Day three saw us cross the French border and travel the last 30 miles to our destination. On account of the short day (not to brag but I could have made this trip one long day, we really took our time) we took a long break in the afternoon by a lake. Not a natural one, but one formed by the gradual subsidence of an underground coal mine. The whole area felt uncannily like Minnesota, for the second time on this trip. 

What's more impressive is that it went from cloudy and 50 to sunny and 75 in just a few hours!

Tomfoolery in the Lidl parking lot.

Not pictured: sweat, grime, and sunburn. We did have many nice picnics like this one!

Our third night wasn't in such glamourous housing as the other two. France has hundreds of cheap, pre-fabricated hotels along its motorways, full of weary travelers, construction workers, and bums like us. Can't win 'em all of course. But it would be here that disaster would strike my journey, with swift and brutal effect. 

After a long and dusty day on cobblestone roads we took a break in the parking lot of a supermarket. We saw arguments with passionate hand gestures, and one woman thought we were homeless and offered us her spare change. That's a new low, eh? 

Like the food poisoning that struck me, I will be quick and direct. For supper we ate in a nice hole-in-the-wall place of my choosing, where the portions were massive and came buried in fries. I had some sort of chicken with cheese sauce and this is what did it. (what's more worrying is that the place was bustling with locals!) I was also the only one in the group to fall ill- from about four in the morning until midday I was totally out of commission. I don't know what I would've done without these friends to take care of me, and I can scarcely express my gratitude in words. 

By the afternoon I'd recovered enough to do what we'd come all this way to do, namely walk along that dang river. So I got back on the bike and caught up with the group. It was a short route, just a few miles, but still I was totally out of it by the end. At the very least I can say that I was there; the others represented the HZ well in my semi-absence. 

A medley of people joined the protest-walk: filmmakers, teachers, local politicians, students, etc. I'm the goofy looking one, fifth from the right in the back. 

This basin along the banks of the river is used to hold contaminated canal-sludge, which is piped here from Belgium for economic reasons. Now you can see why we're protesting. 

After our little stroll, we cyclists boarded a train in Valenciennes bound for Lille where we would stay the next two nights: a much needed rest-day was on the horizon. This hostel was one of the fanciest I've ever seen, much more hotel-feeling than I'm accustomed to: 

Pool tables, all you can eat breakfast, full service restaurant. Amazing! And yes, on the left that is a Frenchman with a baguette waiting for the train. 

Lille is quite the large city; the fourth largest metro area in all of France. So we walked and biked some lovely boulevards, and ate some lovely kebabs: 

A gorgeous spring day, and we spent about 7 hours visiting all the parks in the city. 

Sunburn is impossible to avoid when you sweat so much. Note to self: visit Lille again. Selfie with Ayden and field marshal Foch on horseback. 

We all had one last meal together in the hostel, and outside because it was so warm. (but lacking in flavor because the dang hostel kitchen had neither oil nor spices!) My companions went on their ways by train back to Middelburg; unwilling to take on even more cycling after these four days. The group stage of this trip, as you'll soon see, was just the beginning of the adventure for me...

Eet smakelijk, bon appetit, etc. 

Road Trip: Deutsche Demokratische Republik

The mandatory group picture; on a bridge in Magdeburg. 

As hinted I've just returned from a week-long school trip to the far east of Germany; specifically the cities of Magdeburg and Dresden along the Elbe River. This fine watercourse has been the subject of our studies for the last few months and the purpose of this excursion as to get a closer look at the area and its challenges. Namely floods, droughts, pollution, and invasive species. 

Both cities were in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in my opinion the strangest of the Eastern Bloc countries. We had a few lectures on the lingering east-west divide and how this affects the Elbe River basin. As hard as we searched for traces of the former regime, we found few physical ones. The countryside is emptier and has more factories, and there are a few out-of-place apartment blocks, but otherwise it's exactly like the west. 

Unfortunately for us, we were made to drive to this region. From Middelburg it's about seven hours to Magdeburg, our first stop. And seven hours is a long time to either chat or sit in awkward silence with the professors up front. Regardless we made it work, and our first stop was along in no time: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

"Landscape Park" means "abandoned blast furnaces that you can climb around on" in this context. The Ruhr region is quite industrial even today, and the area is dotted with closed mills like this one. 

A maze of pipes, channels, and cables wraps around the furnaces. The excess heat was taken via a pipeline and used to heat buildings in the city. 

Sometimes it feels rather cinematic!

They had rock climbing walls all over the place too. 

All of our driving in Germany was on the Autobahn, famous for having no speed limit. 130 kilometers per hour (80mph) is recommended, but only trucks actually go that slowly. There are always six lanes, three in each direction, with the rightmost reserved for trucks, the center for the average motorist, and the leftmost containing minivans, daredevils, and those with a death wish. We averaged around 150kph, but traffic jams and road works are frequent on the road network, so it felt much slower.

Duisburg and the Ruhrgebiet was roughly halfway to our destination, which we arrived to around 5:00. We stayed in a jeugdenherberge, a youth-hostel that had something of a summer camp vibe. It was right in the city center, which felt quite like an American city to me: wide avenues, tall buildings, and lots of cars. (the reason being that Magdeburg was reconstructed in a new style after WWII, unlike many other cities which were rebuilt with all their historic buildings) 

A typical Magdeburg street scene. The city of 250,000 is an hour southwest of Berlin, and in most regards quite nondescript. 

We ate a typically German meal in a restaurant full of dark wood paneling, mirrors, and thick carpets.  

This fountain is a landmark in the city, my spur-of-the-moment imitation doesn't do it justice. 

Magdeburg on the Elbe. The river flows swiftly here and there are even some rapids. The Dutchies calculated the flow at 5.6 kph by dropping a banana peel in the river and timing its progress. (after a lengthy discussion in Dutch about whether or not banana peels float and if it's an environmental hazard to throw one into the river) 

Prof. Bleuze inside the courtyard of an amazing piece of architecture in the city center. 

This is the Hundertwasser house, designed by the eponymous Austrian architect. It integrates nature, color, and living space into the same design. 

On Wednesday we drove from Magdeburg to Dresden, a route of about three hours through the countryside. At a few locations we stopped to see floodplains, dikes, and technical measures along the river. It must be said we had pristine weather for the entire trip, not a drop of rain or gust of wind!

A bridge carries a canal over the river near Magdeburg. Sadly it was closed and under repair for an alarming reason: the canal had sprung a leak!

The Pretziehner Wehr, a flood-control device from the 1870s. When these gates are opened, a quarter of the Elbe's flow can be diverted around Magdeburg, lowering the water level in the city. 

A typical floodplain landscape. What was promised to be a six-kilometer walk around the nature park here quickly turned into nine. I enjoyed it regardless!

We stopped for lunch in Dessau, famous as the birthplace of the Bauhaus architectural movement in the 1920s. Think of simple, functional buildings with lots of light and open spaces. "social responsibility through design" is one of the leading values in the movement; and while it's not directly related to Water Management, I found it quite interesting. 

Your average Bauhaus haus. 

It's also a university, so we had lunch in their cafeteria and explored their academic buildings. 

Dresden was our stop that night, which many of you may know from the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It was rebuilt in an entirely old-fashioned style after the war, and we stayed in one of the coolest neighborhoods ever. Full of old, crumbling mansions, and with a lot of graffiti, but it felt safe despite this. Our hostel was in one of these mansions and every room had 12-foot ceilings! 

On the street outside our residence. It's also much larger than Magdeburg, but more compact as well. 

Amazing murals all around, and great restaurants: we had ramen, sushi, and Eritrean cuisine. 

We spent most of our two days here walking around. The city was hit hard by floods in 2002 and 2013, and has been deploying various measures to help mitigate such events. Notably, the Elbe is lined on both sides by broad meadows, space for the floodwaters to occupy. And one district near the city center has a parking garage which can be flooded to divert water off the street! 

There was a pretty serious bridge collapse last September, which has really disrupted traffic around the city. As you can see cleanup and repairs are ongoing. 

It's an imperial-feeling city, with many grand soot-stained buildings. Statues are found on practically every street corner! We had just a few hours to explore the city center and it's high on my list for another trip. Das ist eine echte Hipsterstadt. 

An average city center scene.

A crazy imperial mosaic and bumper stickers. I'd buy one if I had a car!

A blue building in the Kunsthofpassage and the cherry trees in blossom. 

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and on Friday morning we crammed back into our sardine-can vans and drove for 10 hours back to Middelburg, excluding stops. This was easily the most taxing part of the excursion! No fun industrial sites to explore this time, and only three stops on the entire drive. Suffice to say I slept well that night and dreamt about funky German cities.