“À bicyclette”

Last week, Esra asked me “Timo, when do we go for a bike ride?”. Seçil told me that, with summer coming, the children always had these same questions. But I liked the idea and Seçil was absolutely for, and so we planned it for next Saturday, so yesterday!

We first all met at home for a French “crêpes” party, which was nice but let me think that finally, it is better to share activities with the youth, language still being a problem. The good surprise was the arrival of Ida, who is a fluent French speaker, and let me to have enjoyable talk. Especially about the recent events in Turkey, the “Turkish Spring”, which is affecting the country these days. Only one sentence about this, the contestation started from a building project in Istanbul but is revealing of the general gloominess of the current government, and it is interesting to see how a simple town planning is actually very political. 

Anyway, the stomach near to blow up, we walked to Bostanlı, where the municipality of Izmir shares bikes for free. This place is more or less the end of my running way, and this ride let me do discover a new part of Izmir, this “after-jogging-mysterious-place”. 

The landscape was actually awful, full of new residential houses and worse, high buildings, even if, beyond this, appeared a huge flat stretch of dry grass and water, bordered by a nice bicycle path. However, the ballade was pleasant, and moving with a bike let you having a different rhythm than walking which lovely broke my habits. And let me to discover a new dirty wall which constitutes a perfect spot for the next and last wall of  the “Atölye”! 

Anyway this kind of trip is always a good way to reinforce the links with youth, and that is why next week we planed to go to the sea:I like to reinforce the links!