My new bici! Having a bike occasionally makes (night) life a lot easier in Italy. I'm in a good flat for public transport at the moment - serviced by no fewer than four bus routes and a tram - but it's nice to be able to hop on the bike and go where I like, when I like. For all that Italian drivers are... perhaps not the safest, at least they don't drive like it's twenty points for a cyclist, like at home; they're more used to sharing the road. And the city centre of Padova is pedestrianised, with plenty of bike racks everywhere, and the suburbs are pretty good for separate cycle tracks.
My new bike is an upright, so I feel very stately cycling along. This is good for me, as I'm a bit of a nervous cyclist and going by preliminary information, fast speeds on this bike (which is pretty but heavy) are not physically possible. Even downhill.
I bought it second-hand near the train station and got ten euros off by the simple expedient of being rubbish at Italian - he said settanta euro (seventy), I accidentally repeated back sessanta (sixty) and he accepted that as the offer it wasn't. If I only I'd realised, perhaps I could've chipped him down to fifty! But sixty's a decent price, so I'm pleased.
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