All Ukraine Bike Day

Jason woke me up this morning. I am sure it was because he could hardly wait to get up and get going- it is  Velo D'en' ! We ate our breakfast smoothie and cruised out to Ploshad Svobody (Freedom Square) to see what was what. The closer we got, the more bikes were plying the street... we ended up in quite a mass, cycling up the cobbles on Sumskaya Street to the square (which gave us an inkling of the Paris-Roubaix race, let me tell you!). We picked up a couple of t-shirts and biked around the square, past Lenin, past the constructivist Derzhprom, past the uni. We circled a few times, ran into someone from Crossfit, and circled some more until they started trying to get us to sort ourselves. We were supposed to follow the guy with the flag from our region of the city: Kievskaya. I gotta say, though, I was sorely tempted to sort into one of the more interesting sounding regions like: Komsomolskaya and Kominterskaya!

...and just in case:

Komsomol definition
Komintern definition


It was kind of a critical mass event, but I am not sure to what end. They closed two streets to traffic and we "paraded" (their term, not ours) over the two mile route up Lenin Boulevard and back.

Once.

Then they blocked off the street to further cycling. Yeehaw. I was sorely tempted to storm the barricades. I figured there were more of us than blockadists.

Well, I shouldn't complain. Although they did say the streets would be open until 12:30... and it was 11:30. Instead, we left for Pushkinskaya and biked up and down it to the tune of another 14 miles (straight up from the river...straight down to the river...straight up...well, you get the idea).

We had fun, though. As we rode there'd be these great waves of hollers and bell ringing that stole up and down the crowd, as if we were trying to alert Kharkov to our presence and the presence of cyclists in general. There were lots of people in costumes and lots of rhetoric around the need for better cycling infrastructure. The start was a bit harry- lots of inexperienced cyclists AND kids wobbling and crashing into one another. I was really glad I wasn't clipped onto my road bike...

Oh! and I won't keep you in suspense any longer! To see the winner of Eurovision, go to this BBC article and video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22585225