Hellooo~ Wow been so MIA lately that I’ve have forgotten how to adequately begin a post. Anyhoos.
Mother, brother and I went to the park to cycle today. Brother has got a project for school which somehow or another involves cycling and stopping every 10 minutes to check how much distance we covered. Don’t ask me. Seems like some kind of Math project.
I always liked cycling. I always imagined writers as cyclists, simply because it’s such a one-man way of transportation, like the modern horse. You can go anywhere on bike. Well, almost anywhere. And it’s so light and everything. I used to imagine myself in my so-called writer’s garb (think trench coat and scarf) cycling around the university to get from place to place. It’s such a lovely, whimsical picture to imagine. Reality is that the weather here is most definitely not the weather for writer’s garb, the campus grounds are extremely hilly and cycling might prove to be the not-so-smart way to get from place to place. Besides, I’ve heard of friends who’ve had their bikes stolen even though they locked them up. So that’s where my cycling dream ended. But I’m happy enough to travel on foot and by bus.
I still like cycling, although I’m not so crazy about it as I used to be. My brother and I have long outgrown our bikes (which may have been possibly untouched for the last 10 years) so we went to get rentals. The rented bike was weird. The seat was too far from the handlebars but you don’t notice these things in the first 2 minutes of trying it out so I had to live with it for the next hour or so.
I am embarrassed to say that the first twenty minutes in really wore me out. My body had been so acclimatised to inaction that a mere 20 minutes had me struggling to keep my breakfast down. When I was little, nothing in the world could convince me to stop cycling and get off my bike. I felt like I could go on forever with the wind in my face, travelling for miles. Now, I had to stop (whilst my brother whip out his paper and pen to calculate his Math) and really take a break before continuing the ride. Reality shock much. After the first two stops though, my body got the hang of things and I felt loads better, much more like my old self. The wind was blowing and it wasn’t crowded or too hot so the rest of the journey was much more pleasant. Brother pulled ahead all the time (long legs) but he stopped every 10 minutes to do his calculations so I managed to catch up.
Along the way, I caught sight of really pretty places in the park. As I cycled past, I just thought to myself how it looks so much like an enchanted forest and how it looked as if something from Narnia or the Hobbit could be set in. Ok, it wasn’t as magical or lovely as Middle Earth and Narnia themselves but it was a little out of this world. I was too lazy to stop and take pictures though. I was tired and stopping for pictures would throw off my pace. As I had yet to acquire a Google glass which will take pictures for me, I did the next best thing. I just opened my mouth and let the wind blow it all in and I swallowed it and so now the bit of magic stays with me. It’s not as weird as it sounds. Or maybe it is. JUDGE ME NOT. (Possibly the effects of the last chapter of Coetzee’s Foe. If Friday can keep the sounds of the island in his mouth, I can keep the scenes of the park in mine. Ha. So there.)
I took a picture of this one enchanted forest before calling it quits. I don’t know why the trees look purple here. A bit of magic, y’think? 😉
This wasn’t the most magic looking scene I found but it was the first I bothered taking before I got lazy.
The other thing I was fascinated by were these trees with really really white trunks. I’ve named them ‘Milk Trees’ because they look like magic milk chocolate trees.
I’m not a ‘planty’ person so these trees could be diseased for all I know and I’d still think they look beautiful. I went up to one of them and peeled back whatever it is they’re shedding to reveal the really nice white trunk underneath. The white is really stark against the ordinary brown trunks. I just think they’re pretty.
Ok, I just went to Google ‘Milk tree’ and there apparently are such trees which give milk… Darn it. I really wanted the trees I found to be called milk trees too. If you came here thinking you would see trees that have milk in them, I’m sorry to disappoint, I was referring to these lovely trees that look milk-covered. Life is full of disappointments.
Throughout the cycling journey, when I wasn’t bothered by the foreignness of a rented bike and my aching butt, songs began playing in my head that just seemed to accompany the whole cycling thing.
I was just thinking how absolutely appropriate Phil Collins’ song “Strangers Like Me” would go with cycling, especially with the cool intro. Gives the whole cycling pace momentum. I recalled playing some of the Carpenters’ songs in my head too. “Only Yesterday” and “All You Get From Love is a Love song”. Stuff like that. On the way back, I found myself attuned to “Marry You” by Bruno Mars, some Christian songs and Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” when I cycled past the reservoir.
Apparently, bro was also singing to himself. He said he was cycling and singing (alliteration alliteration oh how I love alliteration) and a cyclist passed by and gave him a weird look hahaha. I was whistling. I whistled some parts of “O Magnum Mysterium”, the Alleluia bits and I was thinking how lovely it’d be if my choir mates were here too and were all singing and harmonising on bikes. Haha. Another bike dream.
All in all, it was a very tiring, fulfilling and much needed exercise outdoors for me. I haven’t exercised that much for the longest time and it feels good. My lungs feel like they’ve expanded to its max capacity and I’m using all of my lungs to breathe now as I should instead of just a little of it. I was also really excited by the slight blue of my veins that made their brief appearance on my thighs before hiding under all my fat again. They’ve never worked so hard in pumping my blood for a long while. Mother brought us for a really excellent lunch to round up everything. No pictures of lunch though. I’m no food photographer. I only take pictures of interesting things like trees. Hohoho.
Brother had better get an A for all my hard work.
Marble Fragments 