The most important thing among the 20 kilos of luggage I was allowed to bring on the plane was my beloved bike. I may have a rather small selection of clothes and books as a result (the rest of my stuff may be coming here in late August), but I get to exercise after work.

Cycling in Germany is different from cycling in Norway. To start with, there are more choices of roads – Germany is basically a lot of roads with people in between, where Norway is a lot of mountains with almost no good place to put a road.

Cars go a lot faster here, but it still doesn’t feel less safe because the roads are generally wider and you can see further because of the general lack of hills. At least down here where I live, hills are few and far between, and I miss the uphills and the downhills both. Okay, I’m lying: miss the downhills a lot more. And it does feel less safe when you see all the wooden crosses by the way. I saw three just on the short trip I did today.

Another thing that’s different is that there are so many towns down here that interrupt the flow. You get out of one, have a few kilometers of fast track through the fields and you’re already in the next one. And with each town come traffic lights. Out of 1:54 hours cycling today I spent 6:30 minutes waiting at a red light, and it dropped my average speed from 31.1 km/h that the tachometer said to an actual 29.7. Seems the only way to get above 30 is to run more red lights 🙂