Category: Motorcycles

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Polite pedestrians

When my parents first visited Victoria, they were pleasantly surprised and even mildly inconvenienced by the fact that the local drivers were too polite. When my parents would be walking around town, the cars would often stop to allow them to cross the road (which they felt obliged to do, even though they were not planning to).

A couple of days ago I was riding my motorbike for the first time in 2020, taking advantage of a dry, sunny day. And I realized that the local pedestrians reciprocate the politeness – several of them stopped at the crosswalks and waved me though, presumably to save me stopping and changing gears.

It’s a small thing, but that’s why I like Victoria. “It is so civilized,” as one colleague said when we moved to live here. Besides, being able to ride a motorbike in January end even enjoy the sunshine is a real treat. Check it out:

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Old cars

During the last week of the past school year, after picking up our seven-year-old daughter from school, we went to a car dealership to trade in our old SUV for a new one. Our daughter was super-excited. As we were driving down the Douglas Street, one of the main roads in Victoria, she rolled down her window and shouted, “Dudes, we have a new car!” A few weeks later, she mentioned that she was missing our old one. This made me think that it is curios why we have such strong emotions towards such lifeless objects as our cars.

Of course, we spend a lot of time with cars every day and get used to them. There are also aspects of cars sometimes being luxury items and status symbols. But I could also see and feel genuine excitement at the old car show in Oak Bay that we went to in July. I think it is because of the human’s joint history and emotional connection with horses, which we project to our vehicles. In fact, this connection is particularly strong in the case of motorcycles. There is something about “riding”, rather than “driving” that makes the experience completely different. I think it has to do with the physical balance. On a bike, like on a horse, I need to be constantly aware of my body position, how far I turn my head to look into the turn, how tightly I grip the handlebars or the reins. Also, riding is both more technically challenging and inherently more dangerous than driving. And because challenge and risk help justify any activity, we are more likely to experience flow while riding a motorcycle. By the same logic, owning an old car and keeping it in a running order is a difficult pursuit, and this is what gives the meaning to the experience. We all understand it intuitively. Even if it is not our car, we are grateful to the owners for giving us a glimpse of this experience.

My only worry is that my daughter is now keen to ride my motorcycle. At least, it’s only as a passenger for now, but if my own experience is any indication, there is no going back from there.

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Storytelling challenge

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I am finding that telling a story in a form of a daily motovlog is quite challenging, when limite by a single point-of-view of a GoPro camera and the absence of any voice commentary. At the same time, there is something to be said in favour of about these self-imposed limitations. I might experiment with including a secondary view from another camera at some point, but the reality is that even now it is difficult to keep up with the footage I generate on my short rides in terms of editing.

Evidently, there is not much drama in my short bike commutes (which is probably a good thing), but that is beside the point. The exercise for me is to practice storytelling by highlighting small details that normally go unnoticed. And it is indeed fun to focus attention on the mundane things. For instance, while scrolling through the GoPro footage, I noticed how the framing rate creates optical illusions with the wheels of the moving cars – one of the things that a human eye normally doesn’t do.

Here is the second video in the series.

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Riding with a GoPro

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When my old motorbike got knocked over by a car on a parking lot, my daughter’s first reaction was: “Yay! Dad is going to have a new bike!” Although I didn’t share her enthusiasm at the moment, the bike hit all the expensive parts as it fell, and the insurance company wrote it off as a total loss. So it turned out my daughter was right, I now have a brand new Yamaha MT-09. I’ve been enjoying riding it everywhere for the past week.

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While looking around online for bike reviews, etc., I came across a motovlog by Royal Jordanian, who has a very particular style: he rides round London and uses very little commentary to complement his GoPro footage. It’s counter-intuitive that movies like this would be interesting, but they are, in a strange way. This inspired me to try a variation of this blogging while I ride around. Granted, Victoria traffic doesn’t offer the entertainment value of London’s jams, and filtering between lanes (a main feature of RJ’s rides) is illegal in Canada anyway. Still, I remember the time when, before moving to Victoria, I was looking for anything related to the city – webcams, blogs, videos – to make a mental model of the place that was going to be my new home. I would have certainly liked to see the city from the perspective of someone on a motorbike.

MT-09 is a naked bike, so I didn’t want to spoil its look and feel by installing any luggage racks. Likewise, I didn’t want to mount a GoPro camera on my new helmet. My current compromise is carrying a backpack (it is a bit of an adjustment to minimize the amount of stuff I am used to lugging around on a daily basis) and mount the GoPro on a chest harness.

So here is the result. Maybe, the first video in this series.

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Ducati!

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Today, we took our daughter’s bicycle to a shop in Isola to fix a hand brake cable. Actually, it is not her bike. We are borrowing it from a colleague during our stay in Milan, because his children have outgrown it.

Last summer, when we signed our daughter up for a week-long Pedalheads camp in Victoria, we could not imagine that her riding would be one of the most important and enabling skills for our sabbatical stay in Milan. In fact, she has been riding the bike so much over the last five months, that the brake cables stretched and had to be replaced.

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On our way to the bicycle shop, we came across a motorcycle dealership/store that occupied tree corners of an intersection. Before coming to Italy, I was half-expecting a Ducati dealership at every corner. If I had seen this particular corner sooner, it would have certainly exceeded my expectations.

As we were passing by, I peeked inside the mechanic’s shop, where some bikes were being serviced. It reminded me of a documentary series that I saw a few years ago, where they compared the manufacturing processes, with all the inherent cultural nuances, of Japanese and Italian bike makers. For example, at Honda, the managers knew up to a second how long it takes to assemble a new bike (something around a minute). When they asked a Bimota mechanic the same question, he was a bit puzzled at first, and then replied: “As long as needed.” Later, as he was building the bike, he stopped a couple of times to wipe the partially-assembled motorcycle clean, because “he didn’t like how it looked covered with oil”.

There is definitely a flair of art about Italian bikes, and the un-rushed way they are built and maintained. Too bad we were pressed for time and did not stay longer and observe the masters at work. Oh, the irony!

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Character development: a make-believe approach

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Playing make-believe is a big part of my four-year-old daughter’s life. Her stories and games about the Baby Chick or the  Baby Dinosaur (anything involving hatching from an egg) become more elaborate as the days go by. The main plots repeats over and over again, but the details are added as she matures. At the same time, a lot remains unsaid and left to the audience’s (most of the time consisting of her mom and dad) imagination. This reminds me of the storytelling style of Oliver Jeffers. In fact, I became a fan of his artwork by reading his (I can only assume, autobiographical) books about the Boy and his penguin friend to my daughter.

I thought that it would be a pity not to capture the development of my daughter’s make-believe games, so I decided to add a bit of focus to my short motorcycle rides by sketching some of the episodes as I drink my cappuccino. So today the story starts, as my bike is parked in view of Mt. Baker, on a fantastic sunny afternoon at the Oak Bay Marina cafe. 

“Once there was a Girl, and on a particularly sunny day, she had a very important job: to take care of a great white Egg. The Egg was smooth and shiny, and the Girl didn’t know what was inside. She could hear tiny tweeting noises coming from the egg, and she hoped that it was a chick, who would become her friend.”

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Heavy cloud, no rain

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I notice that I am becoming largely weather-independent in nearly everything I do in my daily life. I am guessing that this is true for many people, at least those living in developed countries and working outside of agriculture, air transportation, etc. Civilization enables us to keep our routines regardless of weather changes, but deep down, there is some evolutionary awareness and emotional connection to the natural phenomena in all their forms.

It is probably healthy to expose ourselves to the elements every now and then. I am talking about sacrificing some comfort, but not really experiencing hardship. To me, riding a motorcycle strikes a perfect balance in this regard (particularly, if I don’t have to ride, but choose to). 

On a day like today, it takes a conscious consideration of the possibility of being caught in the rain when deciding to take a ride across town. Continuing with my exercise of documenting my short rides, I made my way to the highly recommended Habit Cafe  in the downtown – my incentive to sticking with this personal project. On the way, I stopped at a lookout point to admire clouds over the ocean.

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Breaking habits

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Habits are powerful, and that is both good and bad. They enable us to function efficiently, but they also reduce present-moment awareness and reduce our ability to make creative decisions. Ironically, breaking a habit often involves (indeed, requires) forming a new one.

When I was a graduate student, one professor, who eagerly embraced new-at-the-time participation of students in the class by video conference, said that he would try any change of lecture format just to get away from the stereotypical classroom routine.

I am making small steps in the direction of varying the daily program by taking different routes during my commute, at least when I ride my motorcycle. I am prioritizing novelty of the rote over its efficiency, following the suggestion of “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron that taking an unfamiliar path forces us to be aware of the surroundings.

I am also using the rides as an opportunity to practice iPhone-photography. Today, I stopped by the Cattle Point, a spot that made me fall in love with Victoria when I first visited it many years ago. The weather was beautiful, but the light was too harsh to make good photos. Here are a couple of shots, post-processed in the app called Snapspeed, while I was drinking coffee at the Hide and Seek Cafe, which I chose precisely because I’ve never been there before. The coffee, by the way, was excellent.

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On motorcycle riding

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I find that riding a motorcycle, just the fact of being a rider, serves as a kind of universal human connector. If you show up anywhere (at a cafe, at a ferry lineup, etc.) in your motorcycle gear, people strike up conversations with you. “I have an antique Suzuki back at home…” “My dad used to ride a Harley during the War…” Things like that just don’t happen if you show up in a car.

As a professor, I am always looking for ways to connect to students, to find common points of interest beyond the classroom. These connections translate into a more human approach to teaching (or at least, so I hope). During my first year of teaching, I was lucky to have a student in my class, who has just joined our kendo club. Just knowing that we share the common interest helped tremendously in establishing the rapport with the entire class. Yesterday, I rode my bike for the first time this year, and several of the students, who came to my office, saw the helmet on my shelf and told me that they also ride bikes.