Why Can't We Have Thai Massage And Bowling In Queens?

So...Back in the good ol' USA, my Internet connection has been out for three out of five days.  It's nice to be back in the technological leader of the world, isn't it?

OK, I'll end the gratuitous sarcasm.  I guess I'm suffering from a kind of post-partum depression about my trip.  I really want to be back in Prague--with at least one of my bikes, of course.


The weather has been a bit warmer than what I experienced in Prague, and it's been raining on and off, it seems, all of this week.  Astoria's not a bad place to be, but when the skies are gray, I want a Gothic skyline. At least, that's how I feel now that I've seen Prague.

I must confess:  I haven't been on my bike since I got back.  I'm doing now what I did after each bike tour I took abroad, I guess.  After cycling among scenery you wouldn't see in Brooklyn or Queens, and ending each ride with food they don't have here, it's kind of difficult to get used to the mundane--or, at least, what's mundane in your own life--again. I guess, though, once I start riding again, I'll appreciate seeing street signs I can read, not to mention asphalt instead of cobblestones and tram tracks.


Now, here's something you won't find in Queens:

Rainbows And A Full Moon

This has nothing to do with cycling.  Well, I guess it does, because it's about Prague and I did ride in Prague.  


All right, you're not convinced that there's a connection.  Do you care?  You really are looking at this post to see this:

I mean, how can you beat a trip to Prague that includes two rainbows and a full moon on the final night?  No wonder I enjoyed cycling there so much, even if I was riding a bike nothing like any I own over cobblestones and tram tracks, up and down hills.


After all of that, how could I not want to go back?  

Primary Post-Prague

I'm baaack!


Oh, wait:  That was an Austrian accent. Well, it's the country next door, anyway.  Just like an American talking with a Canadian accent, eh? ;-)


All right...Now that I've offended Americans, Canadians, Czechs and Austrians, what's next?  I guess I'll indulge in a cliche and say that I can't believe I'm back already.  I felt like I was just starting to get the hang of cycling on cobblestoned streets on which half of the width was taken by tram tracks.  And I was just starting to feel right on the bike I rode.  It's really not a bad bike, for its intended ridership, anyway.  

I haven't gotten on a bike since getting home last night in a veritable deluge.  Today it's been raining on and off, and there's no place in particular to which I must, or want to, go.   Riding in my usual settings will be a bit of a comedown--sort of like the sensation I felt after eating a really bad takeout meal the day after arriving home from a bike tour from France into Spain and back.


Yes, I miss cycling in Prague, even though it seems like less of a cyclist's city than New York now feels.  But there is definitely a cycling scene developing; it's more or less where New York's cycling community was about twenty years ago.  That is to say, for one thing, that most of the cyclists--at least the ones I saw--are young, though not children.  And, like most Big Apple cyclists of yore (i.e., my youth), those Prague cyclists are riding either mountain bikes or road bikes that have been adapted in one way or another to city commuting.  Back in the day, messengers and a few other "fringe" riders pedaled the sorts of bikes we now call "hipster fixies" (although we didn't have V-shaped rims available in colors to match our team kit!); I saw the same sorts of bikes in Prague.  


Actually, those bikes are strangely appropriate for a city and country that are  still in the process of creating and re-creating themselves from the detritus of its past and things that could scarcely have been imagined during that past.  In other words, they're exactly the sort of bike one would, and should, ride to a music club adorned with psychedelic posters inside a Soviet-era nuclear bunker.  (Yes, I saw such a place!).  And, of course, said bike would be parked in a place like this: