Bikes, the basement and the bubble

In the cellar of our building there 14 bikes in the cellar, plus a couple more parked outside. There are only 15 tenants. This doesn't mean that we live among avid cyclists. We live among a few regular bike commuters and a bunch of people who like to collect junk. Some of those bikes never move. One has had a flat tire for years, and the rest are coated in this layers of dust.

I sold my bike this week. I say that as if I had only one. I had three bikes, and Brian has three also. It's like a little bike Brady Bunch.

We are not alone in our multi-bike household. Germany is the world's #3 country for number of bikes per capita. In 2011, there were about 82 million people in Germany, and about 62 million bikes. How many of them actually get ridden? How many are collecting cobwebs in prewar basements? probably a lot.

The cellar is maybe the coolest part of our building. I like it because it gives you a clue as to how old the place really is. I would like to imagine that it was built 100 years ago, but Allied bombs took their toll on the place and the exterior walls were later replaced. The stairwell and the cellar have to be original. Maybe the cellar was a bomb shelter for the people who lived here. Maybe they hid out in the very spot where our family of bikes are parked.

I had been thinking about selling this bike, paid for with my college graduation money, for a long time. (If you gave me money for college graduation, you probably thought I'd do something practical with it, like pay my rent. Instead I bought a road bike. It lasted much longer and brought me much more happiness than my Minneapolis one-bedroom). I told myself I wasn't in a hurry, that I'd wait until after my summer travels, that it wasn't taking up much space anyway. I was procrastinating. I knew the best way to sell the bike would be to post it online. Germany doesn't have Craig's List but it does have a special version of Ebay where you can post classified ads. I knew that would involve translating my ad, answering the phone and having people come to look at the bike... and really I am linguistically capable of doing all that in German. It's just easier not to.

For this time, anyway, being lazy paid off. I posted an ad for the bike on the Facebook page for English speakers in Hannover, because it seemed easy. I was typing up the translation, looking for the German equivalent of phrases like "or your best offer," when I got a message from an English guy named Jim. He was interested in the bike and wanted to look at it that evening. He showed up, rode it around the block, paid my asking price in cash and took off with the bike.

I took him outside for the photo shoot. This is the photo that lured in old Jim.

It was so easy... too easy? Operating only within the expat community on things like this almost makes me feel like I'm cheating. I am cozy in my English-speaking bubble and can't be bothered, as the English would say, to pop it. I realize this is a dumb thing to feel guilty about. I was in the right place at the right time and now Jim has a new road bike. And I have a wad of Jim's cash. So what if I didn't seize the opportunity to craft a sales pitch in German?

I thought I'd take us dinner with some of the proceeds the next night, but we ended up drinking on the balcony and listening to music and ordering a huge (i.e. American-sized) pizza instead. It was a great time.
Now our bike family is down to five members. There's a little more space in our storage room. And my German language skills have not improved because of the experience.

Just about every day I haul one of my two remaining bikes past that dusty one with the flat tire, out of the cellar and onto the street. I wonder who used to go down there 70 or 80 years ago, and whether they stored old bikes in the cellar too.