Esmeralda

The photo at the top of my blog is a picture of the first bike I ever called mine. It wasn't really mine but an old beater left behind by some scientist who'd moved away from Koeln before I got there. Alexis, one of my co-workers, had locked it on an outside bike rack a few blocks from her flat in Ehrenfeld. When we went to get it, there was a flat tire and one of the rods holding the fender had been pried loose. It was bright emerald green fading the bright sparkly purple, covered in spots of rust.

I didn't know how to fix a flat tire and neither did Alexis, so we found her roommate -- a muscular German who I think worked as a telemarketer or phone operator and was trying to learn Spanish so he could expand his clientele. We needed a new tube and the hardware store would close in five minutes. So the three of us ran to Alexis's roommate's car and he zipped through the city to the hardware where I bought a tube. Then we zipped back and Alexis's roommate repaired the tire. Oops, he said, we bought a size too small. When I got onto the bike, the front tire sagged. It will be ok, he reassured me. He then pointed out other things i'd need to have fixed: the bald patch on the rear tire, the protruding fender-attacher thing.

I wasn't very good at biking back then, especially on the narrow pathways in the central city, so I walked my bike to the U-bahn and carried it down the stairs and on to the train. When I got back to my own U-bahn stop, Aussere Kanalstrasse, I weighed taking the bus closer to home but, feeling adventurous with my new bike, I decided to ride. I was really shaky and with each pedal the bike crunched. On the one hill I faced, I tried to shift gears but nothing happened.

The next day Alexis showed me the toy store/ stationary store in Vogelsang which also fixed bikes. The repairer didn't speak English but I could sense his disapproval when I wheeled my sorry looking bike into the shop. He started mumbling to himself, as if taking notes of everything that needed to be fixed. I managed to explain that I'd only be using it for two months and all I needed was it to be safe -- not perfect. Ok, Ok, he said and I walked out into the garden outside to wait. I read and two children played around me. One ran up next to me and screamed "Hier ist ein schoene Ort fuer PISSEN!" I didn't need an interpreter to understand and I spent the next hour walking around until the bike was ready. The gears still didn't work but the crunching was a bit better.

I biked all over Koeln on that bike: to the healthfood store on Venloerstrasse, into the Neumarkt to go shopping, and up the Rhine just to explore. I still have faint scars on my forearm from when I crashed into a thorn bush on it. Leaving my bike in the bike rack at the Max Planck was much sadder than i thought it would be. I like to name bikes, and I named this one Esmeralda. I wonder if she's still sitting on that bike rack or whether some poor temporary worker at the MPIZ is riding around on her, cursing the gear changer.