Letters from Scandinavia #5: Cycling of the leisurely, bourgeois, preposterous kind

This is my last letter from Scandinavia and I freely admit that I am happy about the series coming to an end. Five weeks are a long time and family and friends, as well as “real” mountains, are dearly missed. I have had a great many companions on my journey which saw me tasting locally brewed beer in Oslo, hiking through thickets of fern on the Lofoten, getting soaked in Lapland, riding a rented bike for 40km on the Åland Islands in order to buy homemade organic bread, sanding a vintage piece of furniture for a summer house on Öland, and absorbing the scent of my new books (more Franzen, Murakami, and Wallerstein) from Copenhagen’s Politikens Boghal. The final chapter of anything written is usually burdened with seeming importance and after testing and discarding various topics I have decided to write about bycicling.Detail of a bike from before 1945 on Öland.

Bikes are one of the cultural objects most likely to be associated with Scandinavia, especially its metropoles Copenhagen and Stockholm. But not all bikes, and clearly not all bikers, are the same. There is the leisurely kind of biker on the Åland Island that enjoys a ride every once in a while, never in a rush, but always friendly and courteous. Further south, on Öland, biking is an important means of transportation for locals and vacationers alike, as distances are too short for either car or bus. There is nothing a bike can’t do on that island: it gets you to late-night gigs at barns-turned-pubs, enables contemplative bird-watching, and gives you ready access to the enchanting natural and agricultural landscape of the Stora Alvaret. Finally, there is that bizarre creature I’d like to call the Copenhagen cyclist: unruly, preposterous, aggressive. A city clustered with heterogeneous architectural styles, unequal building heights, and unusually wide inner-city streets, Copenhagen strives to be the alternative to any (Western) mainstream by taking pride in the rule of the cyclist over the paved street as much as in the intentionally blind eye that it turns on the otherwise illegal hashish bazaar in Christiania.

These angry contemporaries notwithstanding, the very ubiquity of the bycicle across landscapes and continents testifies to its versatility and utility. A bicycle ride might not get you far geographically, but it still removes you from your current impasse and opens up new vistas on the world around you.

Photo above: Our rented bikes in front of Pettas Ekobageri & Café, located in the northernmost district of Åland.

The view from a boathouse-turned-café in Grönhögen on Öland at the end of a bicycle tour through the Stora Alvaret.