A Bicycle Built for Two

One of the oddities of living in a densely populated city is that everything is done en masse. In good old Pt Augusta (300km north of Adelaide), where I spent some of my youth, we only had two sets of traffic lights in the whole town. The annual Christmas pageant lasted all of 20 minutes and involved half the kids from my school. We also had a single toy shop in the town, called Toyworld, and that's where 90% of our Christmas presents came from.

In terms of population size, the Seoul metropolitan area has approximately 24.5 million more residents than my old country town. Taking a nice Sunday evening stroll along the river is inevitably shared with thousands of others who were struck by the same great idea.

Which is fine with me.

It's not as bad as it sounds. I often can't see most of the people anyway, because I'm myopic.

I'm quite a big fan of the Seoul City Council, who do their best to make the world's biggest Korean Beehive a pleasant place to live in. Recently they've been promoting bike riding here, with special subway carriages being renovated for bicyclists. And along the Han River, there's a whole bunch of council-run places where you can rent bikes.

For around $6 you can rent 'a bicycle built for two'. That reminds me of a song that my old man used to sing in the mornings. It referenced a lovesick man wishing to marry some lass called Daisy, and because he couldn't afford a lavish method of locomotion, he alternatively suggests a tandem bicycle.

The lyrics in the song are less technical.

And here's me and the lady who married me, even though I can only afford to rent a tandem bicycle for an hour.

And here's a shot from Handlebar Cam. We had quite a nice journey up and down the river. I'd highly recommend it to anyone with a persuadable companion.

Every elementary school kid in Korea knows the 63 Building. Even those who have never been to Seoul. It's a fairly agreeable looking chap. We sat and stared at it for a good ten minutes before continuing our bike ride.

It spends the days watching over the Mighty Han, which is really just a great big dirty old thing, but equally as endearing.

And after our nice afternoon at the river, we headed out to Itaewon for a nice meal and Alley Kat beers at the Wolfhound. This pub sells some great food, and we were impressed with the fish and chips. Then we went home early and watched movies on our computer.

I wish everyone could have more Sundays like these.