Valdemar

My roommate from Brussels informed me early on that there was a bicycle available with the apartment. He showed me where the keys were and said the seat was a bit high. He explained that the owner of the apartment found it on the street with a "free" sign on it. She called the police to check to see it wasn't stolen and they told her she could have it.

There is a courtyard behind the building I'm in with other buildings surrounding it. There are some yards, gardens, patios, and a bicycle parking structure in the courtyard. I went to the structure to retrieve the bicycle and take it through the gate. There were some young men about ten years old playing in the courtyard. As I unlocked the bike I noticed they had surrounded a patio umbrella anchor and all had a foot on the anchor. They were singing a chant in Danish to see who was "it". The others ran off to hide while the man who was "it" counted with eyes closed as I rolled out of the courtyard.

The bicycle is a mountain style bike and the seat is not only too high but approximately two degrees left of center. To compliment this the handlebars are cocked slightly right of centered to the front wheel. Something is causing the chain to jump off of the gear and I'm unsure as to whether it is the derailer or the shifter. I'm fairly certain the tension spring in the shifter is worn out causing the issue.

Every time I engage the pedals with too much weight the chain jumps causing the pedals to release and all weight is instantly thrown to the lowest pedal position. This often causes the smashing of my scrotum off of the seat. I quickly developed a system by which I position my pelvis at an angle on the seat to protect my taint and scrotum from being smashed. When starting on hills or at intersections I must start slowly and gain momentum so that the chain doesn't skip. It's a free bicycle that gets me around the city so I'm not complaining.

I'm riding north up Søndre Fasanvej and I realized what was eating all of the hubcaps last week. A road crew finished the fresh blacktopping of the entire stretch. They were working on Sunday and finished in one day complete with road markings. In Pittsburgh it often seems like these projects take months as they put a layer down then wait weeks to add the final layer.

I've found an outdoor exercise area in uncharted territory according to the Copenhagen visitor center map. Hidden just out of sight at the corner of Roskildevej and Jyllandsvej is a section of turf that looks like gravel but is actually rubber. There are workout bars of varying heights and configurations anchored into the turf. I go there daily to do my workout routine, a variation of one I developed in jail.

As I am going through my routine I notice that there is a problem at the intersection. Two Danish men are helping a woman push a disabled car through the intersection. She is wearing a burka, at least I think the appropriate generic English word for the head covering is a burka because it comes down the body a third of the way. In Pittsburgh I often refer to most head coverings for females as babushkas like the scarfs the older Italian and Polish women wear around. I do this because depending on what tribe or language people speak the appropriate name could differ.

There are some trees around the workout area and they have a fruit that looks like a small apple or green cherry. I pry open the skin of the fruit with a fingernail and it smells similar to an apple. There is a smaller tree of the same species with very small versions of the fruit. The smaller pieces of fruit smell more bitter and inedible. To my knowledge, an apple tree of this size would grow apples of similar size as the full grown tree. The fact that a mature yet smaller tree has corresponding smaller fruit indicates to me that they are a species other than apple.