The pleasure of cycling

After being secluded at home for over a week thanks to the swine flu, I've rediscovered the pleasure of cycling. It's true that Madrid isn't the best of cities to go by bike, nor is it the best prepared for it either, but I still enjoy using my bike to go everywhere. Even though it can be quite stressful to cycle through the crowded streets full of impatient drivers, I feel that slowly but surely the bicycles are conquering Spain's capital.

When I came back from Berlin, one of the things I missed most was my bike, crappy though it was (I never had it stolen, even though I once forgot to lock it). In the successive years I've noticed a serious increase in the number of bikes that circulate through Madrid. That and the discovery of a cycling lane finally separated from the road to get to uni made me buy a decent bike to use in my everyday trips.

It's true that there is still a long way to go to make Madrid a safe city to cycle. Not only do we need more cycling lanes inside the centre itself, but it is also necessary to educate the car drivers to make them conscious of the new users of the road. This latter necessity will be the hardest to achieve since, sadly, the cars still think they are the only ones entitled to the use of the streets. Hopefully, in a few years, Madrid will have caught up with the other European capitals as regards the use of bikes and its citizens will feel safe while making the world an environmentally friendlier place.

No way through

20 years ago

20 years ago a wall fell. And it wasn't only a physical wall, in the end, those are the easiest to break down. The fall of the Berlin wall meant far more than just that. It meant the reunion of families and friends that hadn't seen each other in years, it meant the come together of two cultures that had been fighting each other through the ways of fear, espionage and psychological torture. Two cultures which tried to bend and shape the human nature to their own will, to represent their ideals and interests.

The fall of the Berlin wall, however, was far more than the symbol of the end of the Cold War. In its own way, it meant the failure of communism in Europe. The realisation that the human nature wasn't prepared for a proletariat society, where the government was the people and the people was the government. This idea, which has been unsuccessfully tried many times, seems to clash with something which is buried deep within us. That "something" is selfishness. Why do something for the common good when I can do something that will benefit me more? This is, to put it simply, the reason why probably communism as Marx and Engels understood it will never work in our society. The human being is selfish by nature, probably due to the survival instinct which we are born with. It is possible to overcome and to teach that the "greater good" is always more beneficial than the private "smaller good" on the long run, however, this concept is only viable in practice within small communities of individuals; once it is expanded to a whole nation, it seems it is doomed to fail.

The celebration they put up stroke me as quite hypocritical, all the presidents standing together and smiling at the cameras as if to show how big friends they now are. When everyone returns to their home countries, this false friendship is turned into studied enmity. The Cold War is over, but Russia still doesn't want US military bases in Poland or the Czech Republic, countries which it still considers its influence zone. Europe condemns the construction of the Berlin wall and celebrates its fall, but still closes its eyes on the 6 times longer wall that exists in Gaza. Hypocrisy seems to be the (un)ethical value politicians fashion these days.