In love with Gran Canaria

It was my first time on Gran Canaria.   Although I knew it was going to be sunny and warm, ringed with sand and rocky cliffs and gouged with the remnants of volcanic eruptions millions of years ago, I didn’t have any inkling how stunningly beautiful I was going to discover the island to be until I rode a mountain bike one morning from sea level to 1,100 metres.

Away from the coast you slowly climb impossibly narrow and twisting roads to stand facing stark outcroppings of lava weathered to craggy fingers topping massive layers of basalt dozens of metres high.  A turn of the handlebars and you’re following a rocky ledge atop cliffs plunging 500 metres to the valley floor.  Climb a little higher and you enter a pine forest.  You stop for lunch with a view to another island more than 50km away, and suddenly realise the air is so pure, so fresh, you could be miles from anywhere.

And you are, because having left behind the walrus colony of package tourists and leather-tanned pensioners lolling around in their thousands down on the beaches, you’re up in the mountains with nothing to hear beyond the wind sighing in the trees like a distant river.   Once in a while at the very top you’ll get caught in fog, a thick swirling blanket as the rising air chills, but it’s never there for long.   I went up there for six days of biking spread over two weeks, and every day it just got better.  I couldn’t get enough of the landscape.

Every morning I’d wake up expecting my body to tell me to just fall back into bed after the pounding I’d given it – and the bike – the day before, but I just had more energy.  I just had to get back up there to discover something new.

Is it possible to fall in love with a place?  To miss it so much after being away for only a week?  I guess this first time was a short fling and destined to remain a sweet memory, but I’ll be back one day with the family.  They should see this.

Here’s a sample of what I saw in two weeks on Gran Canaria.

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Remember the bike we made look too crappy to steal? It got stolen.

Careful readers of this humble blog will recall a post almost exactly three years ago – the last time the little red-haird girl’s bike was stolen - telling how we slapped some rust-stain stickers on her new bike to make it look too crappy to steal.  I’d ordered them from an artist in England who produces them.  And it really did look beat up once we’d put them on, at least at first glance.

And they worked – for three years and 10 days.  Saturday morning, sometime between 9am and noon, a wave of bike thefts hit our building.  Her bike, complete with all the stickers and scrapes and scratches it had picked up along the way – was ripped off.  A downstairs neighbour had it worse: his family had two bikes stolen.

So.

Pissed.

Off!

Not only because at the same time we’d bought her new bike, I’d spent hundreds of euros and countless hours setting up a safe, secure place in our cellar area – behind three locked doors – to store them in.

I’d picked up a special concrete drill bit to install three wall anchors to lock all our bikes to, and we somehow got used to laboriously carrying them down the stairs to the basement every night.

We thought at the time that with all the work and cost involved, maybe we were over-reacting a little, but we saw no other way to store them overnight.

I’d also always thought that locking them up inside overnight was the reason the bike hadn’t been stolen.  Not, of course, because of some stickers.

But now it looks as if they’ll get stolen outside our place in broad daylight, too.  On a Saturday morning, a time you’d think there’d be enough people milling about to keep the scumbags at bay.

At least it’s some consolation that it’s insured, and that we might be able to pick up some sort of a deal on a new bike.  Fall isn’t exactly the time the bike stores are crowded with shoppers.

International Day to Bite Me

I don’t know whether it’s because I stopped drinking coffee a few months ago, or passed the half-century mark a few months earlier, but nothing seems to bother me much anymore.   Not that I just let everything slide, but in dealing with obnoxious people or situations I’ve become a lot more mellow.  What’s the point of getting all in a lather anyway?  In most cases where you get all pissed off at someone or something, there two things at work: the situation and your reaction to it.   Only one of those is entirely in your control.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said about venting, in real life or right here.  So here goes.  Thank you, Deutschland über Elvis, he of the carefully worded, well-researched and always entertaining  posts on matters personal and cultural: may the third annual International Day to Bite Me be the success it deserves to be.

Ahem.

To the driver who honked and brayed at me from his rolled-down window because I was cycling with the traffic on the road instead of dodging pedestrians, spaced-out shoppers, dogshit and various obstructions found all too often on Hamburg’s laughably inadequate cycling path “network” – BITE ME!  Where the hell did you get your license, anyway?  It’s legal to ride on the road unless there’s a circular blue sign with a bike on it telling you otherwise.

To the pedestrian who yelled at me because I wasn’t on the cycling path but on the sidewalk because the cycling path is covered in tons of slippery grit left over from Hamburg’s spectacular failure to remove the December snows, not to mention the piles of filth left over from New Year’s Eve fireworks mayhem: BITE ME!

To the millions of brain-addled Germans who in an annual three-day orgy of mindless, wasteful consumerism spend upwards of 120 million frickin’ euros on fireworks for New Year’s leaving a heaving mess behind for weeks, months and years afterward – they NEVER clean it all up: BITE ME!

To the driver who assumed I was a jobless bum simply because I was cycling at noontime on a weekday: don’t you know some of us work shifts, full-time?  BITE ME!

To the grocery store nitwit who feels it’s his duty to tell me to put the items back in an orderly fashion on the shelf because “es gehört dazu” – BITE ME!  Do you have a cellphone?  Next time you see a federal crime in process, call a cop!

To the awful, pinched-faced cow supervising security at Gatwick Airport: lose the psycho bullshit!  Yes, your minions discovered a battery-powered iPod charger in my hand luggage and they -  in their ignorance of modern consumer technology – have every right to take every soiled piece of underwear out to inspect, rifle through every book, test every cranny for explosives and take apart and run the charger through a scanner a third time, but please: don’t stare at me for minutes on end while assuming some sort of accusatory tone when you ask me the routine questions.  Oh, and I almost forgot: BITE ME!

on not giving a pig’s arse about swine flu

The little red-haired girl is getting over swine flu.  Well, I say swine flu because it’s the hysteria du jour, but it could have been anything that lays a kid low for a few days.

She is one of 16 from her grade 7 class of 28 at home instead of school right now, though we don’t know how many of those kids have simply been taken out of school because their parents got the jitters, or whether they’re genuinely ill like she was.

We also don’t know for sure if it was swine flu, but the symptoms seem to match.

Temperature about 38?  She got up to 39.3C – or nearly 103F – at one point, though thankfully she’s now back to just above normal.

Headache? Runny nose? Sore throat? Lethargy? The British National Health service says if you’ve got only two of their laundry list of symptoms you may have swine flu, so with five already, she had more than a double dose, I guess.

Never mind that most of us have headaches, a runny nose, sore throat and feel like crap when we have a common cold, too, but we’ve got to keep the worry up, right?

The other day the headlines in Germany screamed that a healthy 15-year-old girl died of swine flu within a few hours of her first symptoms, that 14 in Germany have died so far, that we’d all better get vaccinated or the numbers will only climb, and on and on.

Tell you what, people.  When the headlines start to blare about how dangerous it is to go outside and move about in traffic, I’ll start to take swine flu seriously.

The number of people in Germany who die in traffic accidents – that includes cyclists, pedestrians, bus riders, car drivers and passengers, the works – was a little under 5,000 last year, or around 13 – 14 every single day.   The annual death toll is always framed as GOOD NEWS, because the figure has been falling steadily from a high of around 20,000 per year four decades ago.

But if we’re all potential victims of swine flu, and are told we should get a vaccination, we’re also all potential traffic stats, against which there’s not much you can do but try to follow the rules and hope for the best.

Every morning when I haul the little red-haired girl’s bike out of the basement to carry it up the stairs for her, I try not to think of the dangers  she faces in rush hour traffic, armed with only a good light, reflectors, reflective vest and helmet.   I shake my head and imagine her steering well clear of those roving one-tonne tin cans of death she has to make her way through, arriving at her destination safely.

Just before the kiss good-bye, I always slip in a “be careful” in as many ways I can think of spread out over each month, a verbal talisman to pin on her as her rear light fades from view, round the corner and out of sight.

I remember rolling my eyes a bit whenever my own mother said that to me.   Every time, without fail: You be careful, now!  It was her standard send-off, though she’d often tack on short summaries of her more harrowing shifts at the Lion’s Gate Hospital emergency intake.

Ya shoulda seen this guy on a bike who came in lass week, I tellya, he was a mess! Car smucked him going down Lonsdale and they brought him in within five minutes, but his head was so bashed in you couldn’t tell what he looked like.

If I was headed up to Whistler skiing I’d hear about everything from torn ligaments, spiral fractures and quadraplegic cases to ski pole impalements and guys getting lost in the woods, their corpses recovered the following Spring.

Anything to ward off a parent’s worst fear, the fear that came true when her first-born was killed in a car accident at 18, and the constant worry that it might happen again to us.

No, we didn’t get swine flu vaccinations, and don’t plan to.  Too late for our daughter anyway, who got hers the hard way.

I know it’s only human to fear a new disease whose final impact is not yet known more than it is to cower at the daily sight of a throng of traffic at an intersection, but I wish there were a vaccine to protect cyclists.  A pill to pop that would shield us from the dangers lurking around the corner.

I wonder if it would sell, though.  First you’d have to whip up the hysteria, but all we do is take for granted that 5,000 people will die a horrible death in this country every year, and hundreds of thousands  more around the world, and hope to hell it isn’t us.

How to keep a bike thief at bay, if only for a while

This is for Yelli in Berlin, who, like the best two of the three of us, had her bike stolen.

Remember how we made the little red-haired girl’s bicycle too crappy to steal? We sent away for some stickers that make a new bike look all rusted and splotchy, so that a thief passing by wouldn’t give it a second look.

Last time I looked, she still had her bike, so it must be working.

But a bicycle that we thought really did look too crappy to steal got ripped off sometime after we came back from our lovely weekend of cycling along the banks of the Elbe.

It was my wife’s bike and we’d bought it the week we moved to Hamburg after leaving Hong Kong in mid-1997.

I wonder if this is a sign of the times, a signal that things are getting so dire even for thieves that they’re willing to steal any bike that doesn’t have weeds wrapped around a rusty chain. I mean, the bike was 12 fucking years old!  It did have new parts on it, but not many, and the frame looked scratched up and sloppy.

Sometimes you hear a story where a stolen bike is found for sale on craiglist and somehow recovered, or like the commenter whose neighbour called out for Chinese food and was astounded to see the delivery guy riding her own bike which had been stolen a year before, but those are huge exceptions.

Most stolen bikes are never recovered, so how can you make sure you can lessen the chances of having your bike stolen?

In my opinion the best way is to make sure you have a damn good lock – or two – and no matter what you’re using, never leave it outside overnight.

So which lock to buy?

I’ll tell you which one not to buy, and that’s any lock with a wire cable like the one in the photo. Even the best ones can be snapped through with a set of bolt-cutters. We were dumb enough to assume my wife’s old bike wasn’t worth stealing, and so only had an Abus security level 8 cable lock on it, the same kind of lock which had been snapped through six months before on the little red-haired girl’s new one.

The U-shaped locks made famous by Kryptonite are perhaps the best choice, but they have their limitations. They’re heavy, you can’t put them around both wheels unless you remove one, and they’re awkward to work with.

That said, the Kryptonite New York Fahgettaboudit U-lock rated highest in security in a Slate.com survey. Bikeradar.com also raved about it, saying the small size makes it nearly impossible to lever apart.

Though they are probably less secure I prefer a chain, especially the Abus line, because they’re easier to work with. Abus grades its security on various levels from 1 to 25. A level 25 lock is the heaviest and made for securing motorcycles, but cyclists can also use them for locking them up overnight inside if you’re careful not to bend spokes working it through the wheels. This chain is extremely heavy though, and not meant to be lugged around on a bicycle. It’s also really expensive.

The next step down is the one I have – the Citychain level 15. It’s a good compromise between ease of use, weight, price and security. I bought one for home and one for the office. I leave one at the office locked up around a post and one at home so I don’t have to haul it back and forth.

If you have a place in your building to install one, pick up a wall anchor, because simply locking even the best lock around the frame and wheel is no good.  The lock must be around a fixed object – especially if you have insurance on it, which I’ll get to later.

You need a decent hammer drill to install the bolts, but once it’s in, it’s in for life. I suppose you could remove it with a jackhammer, but if a thief is going to use a jackhammer it’s going to attract a bit of attention.

For those who can’t avoid locking up their bike in a high-traffic area, it helps to have two different types of locks. That way, a thief who specialises in breaking open a certain type of lock will pass yours up, unless he has both the expertise and the tools to break into the combination of locks he finds on yours. Worth thinking about if you really value your bike.

Another thing to seriously consider is bicycle insurance, because you can practically forget everything you’ve read up to now. ALL bike locks can be broken into.

A very short clip:

In Germany you can insure your new bicycle against all perils including vandalism, misuse, breakage, wear and tear, sheer stupidity, and of course theft. The monthly rate you pay is based on the retail price of your new bike. As long as you buy a lock worth at least 20 euro – which seems to me like a rather cheap lock – and the bike is locked up to a fixed object through the frame, the bike is insured 24 hours a day. The price is based on a sliding scale according to what you paid for the new bike and lock, which is also insured.

Check it all out – in German – at wertgarantie.de.

It may look expensive to pay, say, 15 bucks every month for insurance, but when you consider how much it costs even to get a blown tire repaired at a bike shop, let alone replace worn brakes, chains, sprockets, bearings and chainrings, it’s probably worth it in the long run. And you have the peace of mind that if the bike is stolen, something that seems to be happening way too often these days, you can get it replaced no problem.

And with someone else doing all the repairs, no black grease to clean off your fingers anymore, either.

PS: There is simply no end to the debate over which lock to get.  Check out the bike forums and get spoked.

Finally picked up a new mountain bike

So many good people have had their bikes stolen lately.  Recent victim Yelli in Berlin says she’s hoping I’ll post something on how to keep a bicycle safe.   I plan to do that over the next week, but in the meantime, a bit of fun:

A couple of weeks ago, I finally bought myself a new mountain bike.

Fifteen minutes through the travel category here will show you I have no problem spending money, as long the only thing to lug home are memories.  But toys and gear don’t grab me.

I can’t even stand shopping for stuff that will add to the simple pleasures I get out of life, which is probably why I have a 15-year-old bicycle, 10-year-old skis, a 4-year-old computer and iPod, and why it took until only two years ago to finally pick up a digital camera.

But after convincing myself that getting a new bicycle would give me that extra kick in the butt to get out riding again for the simple joy of being on wheels for its own sake instead of merely a way of commuting, and having given up on Angela Merkel ever getting back to me with my idea about a bike-scrapping rebate, and reminding myself that in less than a year I’ll be turning 50 and officially a crotchety old geezer, so why not give myself an early birthday present to lessen the pain of it,  I went shopping for a new ride.

One stop at one shop was enough to convince me that I didn’t need to look any further to buy a decent bike.  It took a couple of weeks for the frame to arrive from the factory in Italy, but as soon as it did they called me over so I could watch them build it.

If it’s true that you should buy quality and moan only once, I was moaning like hell two hours later at the till, but only half-way through my first spin down the Elbe the sticker shock was far behind.

It felt like flight on wheels.  What a difference from the old one!  It feels so light and fun to ride I was thinking: why didn’t I do this a few years ago?

Actually, I’m glad I waited.  Bike technology has been flying ahead along with everything else, but since I’ve been out of the market for so long and not really paying attention, I’d missed all the new developments.

The biggest change is in the brakes.  I’d first discovered the amazing quality of disk brakes while on a raging blast on a rental bike through the Whistler Mountain bike park during my trip to Canada two summers ago.

As long as you keep oil and grease away they grab no matter if you’re going through rain or mud, though they’re so responsive, you stop too abruptly if you apply the same force as with the older rim brakes.

I’ve been told they’re practically maintenance-free: no rubber brake pads any more, no more fiddly adjustments, no constant wear on the rims, which if you leave too long without checking can actually wear through.

And no cables to snap when you least expect it, either.

Instead of a metal wire, the cables are filled with a fluid that looks a lot like motor oil.

Most of my riding is on the city streets, but the mountain bike tires are too slow on pavement, so I also convinced myself to dig a little deeper and pick up an extra set of front and back wheels, onto which I installed some narrow and light road-racing tires bought in Canada on that last trip.  So you might say I bought a bike to fit the tires, instead of the other way around.

The thin tires make it look rather strange.  With the fat, nobby ones it’s just a regular mountain bike.  Slip on the skinnies and it’s as spindly as a spider web:

Fat tires or thin, it’s been a lot of fun so far.

I’ve even had fun junking things we’ll never use again to clear a spot for a safe place to park it overnight.  Yes, we’ve learned our lesson. A thief is going to have to break into our building past three locked doors just to get near it, and then he’s going to have to break through a damn good lock.  More on that later.

A beautiful cycling weekend, then another bike gets stolen

Part three of a series of four on a beautiful weekend of cycling about two hours south of Hamburg. Part one is here. Part two is here.

I was going to rave and go on and on about what a great weekend of cycling we had a few days ago two hours southeast of Hamburg, but maybe the photos this time do a better job.

Sometimes you get lucky in Europe and manage to find a place that allows you to forget you’re surrounded by 500 million other people within two or three hours’ flight time.

Then when you get back to the city and lock all the bikes back in their usual spots and get up to go to work Monday morning, you find this:

Another bike stolen.

This time it was my wife’s.

FUCK!

Germany’s best little corner for a weekend of cycling

Part two of a series of four.  Part one: storks mating

Ever been to a place you loved so much, you felt reluctant to tell anyone about it for fear it would set in motion a chain reaction resulting in great throngs of people who would destroy the reason you loved it in the first place?

Please don’t tell anyone, then, but tucked away in a forgotten little edge of what for 40 years after the war was the furthest point east in the northern half of a divided Germany lies the country’s best little corner.

We went there for the first time in the summer of 2007, telling ourselves we’d go back for another look one day.  So, taking advantage of the best stretch of Spring warmth and sunshine I can recall in the dozen years I’ve lived here, we loaded up the bikes last weekend and drove two hours southeast of Hamburg to Schnackenburg, a little town on the banks of the Elbe.

Schnackenburg was for more than four decades surrounded by the border with East Germany.  Cut off from its usual connections to the east, the booming Wirtschaftswunder in the rest of West Germany and especially downriver in Hamburg seemed to pass it by.   Across the Elbe, residents of East Germany actually needed special permission to approach within one kilometre of the border and its “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall,” so nothing much was built over there, either.

The result after all those years of relative neglect and decline is an entire region almost completely untouched by the post-war overdevelopment and mass tourism which has marred parts of the North Sea and the Baltic coasts, the two other obvious options when looking for a weekend out of Hamburg.

What development you can see is of the kind that makes the region even more attractive to birdwatchers and nature-lovers.

The banks of the Elbe have flooded in destructive fashion several times over the past hundred years, most recently in 2006 and 2002, the 2002 floods threatening some of Dresden’s most valuable buildings and artworks.  Efforts since then to re-think flood control away from building higher dikes and instead spreading the water out over a wider area has resulted in a huge increase in the amount of marshy living space for migrating birds.

What they’ve done in the area we cycled through is build another dike far inland from the original one.  The original dike has been punctured with weirs, so that rising water can escape from the river to flood further inland.   The new dike still protects towns and villages along the riverbank.

The following video is taken standing on the new dike looking west toward the old one, which is barely visible in the distnace.  The video is no screaming hell to look at, but if you turn the volume up you’ll think you’re in the jungle for all the birds and frogs you hear:

On our last trip we were delighted at the number and variety of bird life to see as you wend your way along the dikes through a huge nature reserve.  The highlight back then was coming across an entire field full of cranes feeding.

This year, the storks were the ones to take our breath away.  We must have seen about 50 over the two days, feeding alone or in pairs in the wide expanse of marshland.  The locals set up platforms on top of farmhouses or at the top of stand-alone poles upon which for them to build their enormous nests.  Look closely and you’ll see the nest are also home to other, smaller birds.

We kept track of all the animals we saw or heard that weekend.  In addition to storks we saw wild geese and swans, grey herons, a variety of ducks and a few hooded crows.  They look like the common black variety you see everywhere, but are coloured a duskey grey.

We listened to the two-tone song of the cuckoo and the rumble of bullfrogs, stopped to admire a herd of domesticated wild horses, and saw long-horned, long-haired cattle wading through the marshland.  They reminded me of the buffalo I saw wading through rice paddies in Vietnam on a trip there 15 years ago.

The Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin may be the best place for Cold War history freaks to gorge on decades of hair-trigger paranoia, but Schnackenburg’s border museum in a modest, three-storey harbourside building is also a good way to get an idea what it was like to live here during that era.

You can see the equipment the East German border guards used, original documentation uniforms and maps, mock-ups of border crossings and reams of personal anecdotes… all in German, of course.   I found most interesting the bureaucratic hoops Germans had to go through to cross the border if they wanted to, as well as the stories of how hundreds of East Germans paid with their lives trying to get to the other side.

A sample:

Fifteen-year-old high school student Rainer Bahlhorn together with a 14-year-old classmate tried to cross the Elbe to the west early one evening in late December, 1970, with the water temperature at only 5 degrees centigrade.  The younger boy was later found one km downstream, still alive yet completely exhausted. Bahlhorn, after massive police, border patrol and Red Cross volunteer searches, was found on a riverbank sandbar shortly after midnight.  He died of hypothermia later in hospital.

You can still ride along the two-lane concrete tracks laid out for tank movements and border patrols on the eastern side.  You can also visit a couple of old border sentry towers, forbidding old piles that look as out of place in the green, flowing landscape as an oil slick in snow.

One of them we came across is now a cheap hostel with beds at €25 a night, the one with the spiral staircase leading to a rooftop lookout has telescopes mounted so you can view the surrounding countryside.

Those who come prepared to watch the birds will already have binoculars, though.

Next post: the cycling.

A little tale of storks and a little tail

Part one of a series of four.  Part two: Germany’s best corner for a weekend of cycling

Apologies to those wing-bats from stopbirdporn.org who ruffled a few feathers at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, but you can’t help but watch when storks decide to do it.

They also don’t seem to mind a bit.

While cycling on the banks of the Elbe this past weekend two hours upriver from Hamburg we saw about 50 storks spread out over miles of nature reserve, nesting on farmhouse rooftops or on specially built stand-alone platforms.

Entering one village we saw a magnificent pair, so we stopped to have a look and take a few photos.

It all happened so fast.

First one of them clapped its beak and threw its head back.

The the male flew up and stood on the female’s back:

Then they got down to business:

Total elapsed time from foreplay to damn, that was good: about 15 seconds.

Open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel asking for €250 for my old bike when I buy a new one

From: some blogger

To: Angela Merkel, The Chancellery, Berlin.

Subject: Giving €2500 to Germans to scrap their old cars if they buy a new one.

Dear Angie,

May I call you Angie? It’s just that I feel so close to you now that I have one of your Barbie Dolls. I was going to give it to my daughter, but since she’s not into them and they did such a flattering job on those thunder thighs I thought I’d keep it for myself.

Anyway, about those cars. I think it’s a great idea to give everyone here in Germany €2,500 to scrap their old car if they buy a new one. Prop up Opel through the back door, get those junkers off the road, a little jiggery-pokery by the dealer and maybe with a bit of luck you’ll see the ol’ beater again on your travels after it’s been sold off for a profit in Eastern Europe or Africa. We’ve thought of doing it, but even though our car is about 15 years old, we figure it’s good for another 100,000 km if we treat it right, so why bother?

Instead, I thought that since I’m in desperate need of a new bicycle to get to and from work, you might extend the favour to cyclists by giving us a few bucks too?

I love my old bike, Ange. We go back 15 years to my Hong Kong days, but it’s on its third set of front and back sprockets, the front and rear bearings once, two sets of new gears, brakes, cables, rims, spokes, tires – the works. The only thing left from the original bike is the frame, the forks, the handlebars and a few scratches.

Since the new bike I lust for is going to cost between €1,500 and €2,000, I figure if you’re throwing €2,500 of my tax money at people willing to spend €15,000 to €20,000, we could just lop off a zero on both sides and both of us can go home happy.

I know what your thinking. You’re rolling those sweet, droopy eyes that look so good on television and thinking: yeah, right. Why should you care about cyclists? We don’t buy that high-tax gas, so we don’t contribute anything to the German state. We don’t provide workers with high-paying jobs, we’re always whining for more bike paths, and when we get home we drip sweat on the carpet.

But I figure I’ve saved the planet about five tonnes of carbon over the past decade by refusing to buy a car. In fact, I’ve probably saved it about 5,000 tonnes because I haven’t chartered a helicopter to get to work each day. When you think about it, I could sell you carbon credits for that trip to Greenland you made a while back to traipse around on the ice and say: It’s melting! It’s melting! Let’s do something!

So whaddya say, Angie babe? Instead of caving into the unions and the auto lobby and propping up the last legs of an industry that only holds us hostage to this unsustainable petroleum- and metal-addicted vampire economy, how about living up to the Germans’ worldwide reputation as people who actually care for the environment and help out those of us who choose the most sensible form of transportation so we can do just that? I promise to donate the money to research into alternative forms of energy.

Yours sincerely,

Ian in Hamburg