From Latvia to the Netherlands: a bike ride and land for 70 thousand euros per hectare
The next day, Sunday, I also had a bike plan. Not as easy as "you ride down to the sea and take the bike bus back", but still okay. I decided to return by train. On the plus side – there are a lot of stations, and you can change your route on the fly. On the downside – it's not always clear where and what time the 🚆 stops.
I headed to the sea again, but not to the southeast, like on Saturday, but to the northeast, towards the city of Figueres. Mapping out a route wasn't exactly simple, unlike back in my native lands. Latvia is underestimated by many as a place to live. The thing is, we have plenty of land with no one around, and the terrain is moderately hilly. In practice, this means you can walk or ride wherever you want, with minimal restrictions. If you love being in nature, this is a huge bonus. In Girona, things are completely different. In Valencia, everything around is vegetable gardens, while in Girona, the hills quickly turn into 🗻, where for bike rides you need a solid level of fitness and low body weight.
By the way, speaking of land. In Latvia, a hectare of agricultural land costs about 4k €. In the Netherlands, the EU leader in this metric – 70k! Seventy, Carl!
Of course, if there are absolutely no ⛰, like in those same Netherlands, it's also boring. Nothing to look at, no action. And in general, the famous pop anthropologist Drobyshevsky tells us that the main trait of primates is curiosity without a specific goal. Almost no other animals have this. 🐈 are very interested in their surroundings, but only in what might be useful to them. Humans, as we know, are constantly engaged in utter bullshit like collecting stamps or running Doom on coffee machines. I'm not even talking about sufferers of attention deficit disorders like me, who can't even read a paragraph without getting distracted. On the other hand, I prefer useless interest in everything to depressive episodes when there's no interest in anything. For that to happen, just not getting enough sleep is enough for me.
In the morning I ate chocolate cereal, said my goodbyes to 😺 Jeff, and I was off. First, I rode along another via verde (greenway) route, so as not to constantly stare at the map on my gadget (📱). Then the greenway ended, and I rolled along according to my own plan.
Looking for coffee, but found dumplings
I kept pedaling and pedaling, and my strength began to wane. It happens, especially if you're pedaling for the second day in a row. I had drunk all my tea long ago, so there was only one option – to sip some ☕️. For that, you need a local joint, and those are only found in towns. Well, no biggie – we figure out where to pull over, and boom, a restaurant is right in front of us. Seems like a village, but the restaurant is fancy – the guests are met at the entrance by practically the owner himself, he asks what's new since their last visit, escorts them to their table. Probably nice, but I hadn't had a last visit, so I just asked if I could get a coffee. To which I was politely but firmly told to get lost. We're a restaurant, you see, not a tavern, and why don't you go, dear friend, to a bar. In the end, the dude took pity on me and informed me that the bar is a stone's throw away – literally a hundred meters down the 🛣.
No sooner said than done. The bar turned out to be not just a bar, but a gastrobar! If anyone remembers, I often joke that Daugavpils is the birthplace of elephants, meaning gastrobars. Not everyone has even heard such a word, and in Riga I haven't noticed an overabundance of gastrobars. Until this moment it seemed to me that it was just our provincial trait. Gotta show we weren't born yesterday, we can do trendy stuff. After visiting Spain, my opinion softened. Spain has a long tradition of tapas snacks, which are consumed in a bar in the evening with a glass of wine in the company of friends. Foodies in London hyped it up and made the concept of a gastrobar fashionable. Naturally, God himself told the Spaniards to slap this label on all their joints – after all, they had been doing the exact same thing for decades, if not hundreds of years. Tapas – micro-snacks served with wine or beer – have existed for several centuries. Because of the hot climate in Spain, insects crawl into the glass, and on the coast the wind also blows sand in. To avoid this, waiters covered the glass with a slice of jamón or bread. "Tapa" means "to cover", hence the name. Nowadays tapas isn't just something flat like a lid, but a whole assortment of snacks, different in every region and even bar. You can even tapear, that is, go from bar to bar and taste things.
So here I am – popped into a gastrobar for coffee, but seeing some weird dumplings in the waiter's hands, I decided to do some tasting. ¿Did I get food poisoning? ¡
Ordered gyoza and a latte at a bar, but got a happiness hormone – an unexpected lunch boosted my dopamine
At the bar, I ordered the unknown nutritional unit I had spotted on the counter, and a latte, out of habit. Then I headed to a table on the lawn. Sat down in the sun to generate more vitamin D, otherwise what's all this for. I locked my bike within eyesight with my teeny-tiny combination lock with an alarm. By the way, the lock wasn't bought on Ali, but on http://bike-discount.de , for reliability – it's hardly worth skimping on such a thing when the bike costs 2k. Not perfect, of course, but enough to react. I also wanted to take a sturdy and compact Rockbros lock, but forgot it in Dpils.
Soon they brought me the grub. It turned out to be gyoza , a Japanese dish similar to pelmeni or khinkali. There are differences, and in total the difference is significant. The dough for gyoza is very thin, and they are usually fried in a little oil until crispy. The filling varies, but there's usually a very spicy garlic-ginger sauce. Besides, gyoza is more of a snack, not a main dish. Which, of course, fits perfectly into the idea of a gastrobar, since it's not a restaurant after all. The gyoza went down well with me, but I'm no picky eater. I didn't get all pretentious and ask for it without meat. I rarely eat meat, but I don't always overthink it to the point of spending half an hour looking for a joint or studying the menu. This time my schedule was tight, and I decided to rely on fate.
Besides, there should be some spontaneity in life (which doesn't rule out planning). There is a common misconception about dopamine, that it's awarded for achievements. A slightly less common one, and closer to the truth, is that it predicts future reward, "promises" it. In reality, the simplest amateur explanation that can be given is that dopamine is needed more to reward for the difference between what was predicted and what actually happened in reality. I expected a tolerable coffee, because I'm used to coffee in Spain being so-so. Unexpectedly I got an interesting and unusual lunch. This brought me way more joy than just coffee. In addition, the coffee was also tasty, another +10% to dopamine. Obviously, this is an extreme simplification, but I'm not writing a scientific paper here either. As Miron Yanovich Oxxxymiron rapped in his latest track: "my job is to entertain you with trifles during the war."
Colomers – the gastronomic capital of kayaking: a gastrobar and lounge in the center of a water show!
A bit more about the gastrobar. It's called "gastrobar and lounge La Lludriga 3.0" (sic!) , in the village of Colomers (population 195). You might ask, why are there two large trendy eateries in such a tiny place? The answer is simple – it's a popular spot for kayaking down the Ter river, flowing from the very beautiful Les Guilleries mountains to the Mediterranean Sea through Girona. That's from west to east, ≈ 200 km. Right across from the gastrobar I saw the largest number of kayaks in one place in my life. Right off the bat, I'd say there were about 80 of them. And I used to think there was an abundance of kayaks in Aukštaitija (Lithuania)! Here's where their real rookery is, in Colomers!
After grabbing a bite, I moved on. The sun was getting redder and redder, and the air colder. While there was still time, I turned onto some dirt paths to get to Figueres more directly. Unfortunately for my enthusiasm, the dirt paths, although more direct, were much more MTB-ish and hilly. It's exciting and great, but not when it's November outside and the sun sets at five. In the end, I rode into some absolute wild bushes under a bridge in such a way that I had to go back to the asphalt.
I realized my efforts weren't cutting it – no way I'd make it before sunset. Gotta reroute. Looking at the map, I found out where the nearest train stations were. Did you know, by the way, that Google Maps has magical things: if you type "train station", it will show you stations, and if you click on a station, the routes that go to and from it. A very useful thing to immediately figure out what rails are where. It makes it easier to understand where you can get to in a reasonable amount of time.
For me, this place turned out to be the village of Sant Miquel de Fluvià , so tiny that even the station was closed. It wasn't exactly easy to even figure out which train to board and in which direction to go. On the platform was an elderly Catalan lady, from whom I managed to find out what I wanted using sign language, though not immediately. The train I needed goes to Barcelona through Girona. Trying to buy a ticket on the internet, I found out that you can't do it in the Renfe app or on the website, only at the ticket office. Here I had to gesticulate even more vigorously, because there was no other way to get the message across.
I managed to understand the important part: if the ticket office is closed, then Mr. "Inspector" will sell me a ticket right on the train. A few minutes later, with some jitters, I climbed into the nearest carriage, because it's scary that the train would leave without me. "It seems life is getting better," I thought with my dad's catchphrase, but it was not meant to be. The train soon stopped completely for some reason, and over the loudspeaker they announced "blah-blah-la-la-burle-burle". What the heck was that? Did I even make it to Girona, or did I have to spend the night on the platform?
Adventures with a stowaway, a French girl and a Ukrainian on a train
I have an anxious nature, and I already started hallucinating all sorts of nonsense. Like they'll come for me right now, because I'm riding without a ticket. With some effort, I reined in my restless brain. Found a girl nearby, from whom I tried to find out what had happened. She turned out to be French (makes sense, the train goes along the coast from France, skirting the Pyrenees ). She translated the announcement for me. It turned out there were some aggressive rowdies on the train, and the driver had called the police to haul them off. Out of a lack of communication, I pestered the girl and asked her to explain the exact same thing to me in French, hoping to understand at least something. Alas, my brain is totally screwed, and those pathetic crumbs of this beautiful language that I knew have already been forgotten. On this sad note, I left the girl alone to go be sad. It didn't last long – the train started moving again. Busted the hooligans fast, in like ten minutes!
As I was promised by the lady on the platform, Mr. Inspector came by, and without any questions wrote me a ticket (paid by card). The last detail – a Ukrainian guy was sitting nearby in the carriage, watching a video with sound on his phone without headphones, slightly bothering the people around. So that's how stereotypes are born - not without reason, as we can see. I don't know if I should put a disclaimer that this does not apply to all Ukrainians. I still hope that readers aren't such morons as to find things in my words that aren't there, and that they understand at least the basics of predicate logic.
As is well known, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But if Socrates died from poison hemlock, and Socrates is a man, it by no means follows from this that all 107 billion people that our planet has known died from food poisoning.
Thus, without any special adventures, I reached the Girona train station, where I lingered on the platform for ten seconds to admire the crimson sunset. The air was rapidly getting crisp. I pulled on all the pants and sweaters that I usually take with me for the evening, so as not to freeze my family jewels off, and rolled to my hill. On the way, I popped into the already familiar Pakistani shop, because there you can at least see your bike through the window, unlike a supermarket.
The micro-vacation was over, because the next day was a working Monday again 😒
43 km in 5 hours, almost 400m elevation gain according to the barometer
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