A Venezuelan wacky guy living his Australian dream

Australia is a huge country with long distances; those are the main two things you will listen when you are offshore, but you never grasp the meaning until you have to walk, ride or drive.

As many of you might know by now, Kathy and I love to take walks for hours (main reason of our latest tradition, the seven bridges walk), but for everyday commuting is a bit troublesome to walk 20K, under this hot sun or the little-yet-effusive rain of Sydney.

To travel to and from work you will need to relay on buses, trains, cars or any other type of transport you might think of.

Sadly (and this one is a very hard critic to my follow country men and women) Venezuelans have the wrong appreciation of need; that is ‘you need a car for everything!’ or the very well known ‘Is impossible to live in this city without a car!’ (Wrote down two pages of complains justifying myself, realised later on is not worth it).

Before anyone jump with their fire-on torches in hand witch hunting, I would like to expose my ideas so you could later on tell me yours.

First of all, a car is not a necessity (unless you have offspring); the car as it stands is a commodity. Is a pricy sweetener of your everyday commute and as such you should be able to move around without you needing it.

Second, Sydney’s transport system is pretty good (in comparison to many others such as the NY Subway and NY buses, Spain train system and the list goes on and on. Although is not cheap and occasionally stops for 20 to 40 minutes is a system that I have been using for at least 29 months and I find it fast and reliable.

And Third, even though Sydney does not have an awesome bicycle system as Melbourne or Brisbane is a kind of city where you could easy start riding to and from work.

And, why am I writing all this?

I got a bicycle! WEEEEEEH

Bought it just before Boxing Day and it took 10 days to be assembled and delivered to me.

So now I am going to start training to get to the office (at least 3 days a week), getting more active and blood flowing, maximising my creativity and hopefully my productivity.

At the moment I have done my first try to get to the office from home and totally failed it. After a long uphill ride, my legs started failing, I was panting and lose control of my bicycle; resulting in a less than spectacular collision of my body against the hard concrete (with the later on disapproval look of car drivers passing by).

Next couple of weeks will be intense training (trying to build up resistance and muscle strength) to then perform my second attempt to become one of those guys riding like the wind. Let’s see how it goes.

Cheers and till next time,