My abiding memory of a few days in Utrecht remains that the side of town I was on was under reconstruction, and that they hadn’t put the pavements back yet. And Google Maps hadn’t kept up. So I walked into tangles of roads, spaghetti junctions and random traffic a lot. Oh, but they like their bicycle lanes, like good Netherlanders. In fact, in Utrecht, the cyclists are mad with power. They want the bike lanes and the pavements now, and they will get really pissed off when you dare to walk on the pavement like a filthy primitive pedestrian. I almost got run over at one point by a guy with a very well trained moustache on a wooden bicycle. Do you know when the last time someone got killed by a guy on a wooden bicycle was? The seventeenth fucking century. It’s not right. They make Berliners look like the pure picture of politeness.
written 17 November 2017