riding on the sidewalk

is a bad idea. I got bitten by a dog in San Francisco because of it, and yesterday evaded a suddenly-appeared child on a razor scooter by cleverly vaulting over my handlebars and onto my surgically-repaired knee. Time will tell which ends up being the more serious. I'm betting on the knee, but there's always the chance of rabies.

france, some benefits of living in:

Great pastries on every corner. A society in which a proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 provokes a huge fight, as opposed to a society in which a proposal to give some people health insurance provokes a huge fight. A legal website called Deezer that has free on-demand play-as-many-times-as-you-want popular music (I'm loving this one). Really fast, cheap internet/phone/TV service (also loving). And all the European livable cities/urban planning stuff too, I suppose.

consequences

I missed my train returning from Brussels to Lyon, and had to wait several hours for the next one. That experience was pretty bad, and I was still annoyed when it was over, because now that I had missed a train, I had to leave more time to get to the station in the future, to avoid a repeat.

So when I took my train to the Paris airport, I got to the train station 15 minutes ahead of time, feeling both virtuous and pissed off at the 15 minutes I could have spent sleeping. It was then that I remembered that I had no actual train ticket, and had to exchange my plane ticket for a train ticket at the window, a process that took 14.5 minutes. So in the end I made my train by (I think) the second-closest I've made a train by, and the first-closest without being fined.

fine in belgium

Returning to Brussels from a conference in Mons, Belgium, I was running frantically in order to catch the last train. I took a few wrong turns, then came to the station. After trying all the locked doors, I ran around the side, saw my train, barreled through the underpass and back up, and lunged for the door as I heard a woman yell wait, forced it open and got in. The woman kept on yelling, though, and eventually I exited the train to go up to her. She was the conductor, and very angry at me. We got on the train, through the non-closed door that she had (apparently) been telling me to go to, and she fined me 15.80 euro for boarding the train after the signal for depart. A Belgian colleague told me the next day that someone had boarded like this, then got into an fight with the conductor, and either fallen off the train or thrown the conductor off, and someone lost a limb, so they're very serious about this offense now. It wasn't clear to me how cracking down on this would help the limb-loss, but there you are.

glamorous, foxy foxy

I used the bathroom in economy while seated in first class. Why wasn't that a security risk? Why not say, "For security, please only use the bathrooms in cabins equal to or lower than your status." It's more honest, although I guess for full honesty they also need to drop the "for security."

lisbon

I assume everyone who reads this blog already knows this, but I've been offered a 3-year position in Lisbon, following a successful appeal of the decision not to offer me a 3-year position in Lisbon. Hopefully when I get back to Lyon there will be a contract in my mailbox.

ranking bike programs

I've now ridden bikes through sharing programs in Lyon, Paris, Barcelona, and Brussels. My thoughts:

Barcelona has by far the worst system. You can't choose which bike you want, if there's 1 good bike and 5 broken ones, you have to keep on taking out a random bike until you get the good one. The bikes are lighter, but their "baskets" are pretty useless. There are no temporary cards, which maybe is necessary because of the inevitable tourist onslaught. Worst of all, the system shuts down at midnight, which makes no sense. Points for cute name: "Bicing," playing off the BCN.

Paris, Lyon, and Brussels have largely the same setup, because JC Decaux runs all of them. Props to Paris for: maps on the kiosks, scrollable maps in the kiosks, tap-n-go bikes so you don't have to wait in line. Brussels has all those too, and its bikes have 7 gears (3 for Paris). Paris suffers because it's actually a little big to bike around in, and the ratio of stations to people and area is kind of low. Brussels has 2 nice aspects. First, the city has made almost all one-way streets two-way for bicycles, so bikes can go anywhere they want. Not sure how the cars feel about it, but I liked it. Second, the city is so small that the kiosk maps can be incredibly detailed and also cover most of the city, so you can avoid getting lost.

Lyon still wins in the end, for me, because it has so many stations -- 340 for a population of under a million, as opposed to 1000 for 10 million in Paris, or ~100 for a million in Brussels. There are a lot of bike lanes. Big downside -- the touch screens that make everything a pain.