The Ride of Silence, held on the third Wednesday in May, is an annual international bicycle ride to commemorate cyclists killed or injured while riding on public roads. Participants are encouraged to visit a ghost bike in their area and take their photo with it as a gesture of honoring the deceased person. In past years in Munich hundreds of cyclists took part, a moving experience. This year Janos and I rode alone.

The rules are simple:
1. Ride in silence
2. Remember and honor those who've been hit & killed while riding or seriously injured
3. Ride slowly and a relatively short distance - this is not a race
4. Wear a helmet & obey road laws for bicyclists

We cycled to a ghost bike in Munich to pay our tributes.

We moved from Görresstrasse in Munich to Gauting exactly one year ago. It was a big decision after living in the same apartment for 35 years, and it entailed a lot of work. Now after a year of life in the suburbs I can say, yes, it was a good idea. We like it here, the apartment is fine and the best part is that we can either walk or cycle from our door. We also enjoy that we no longer have to climb the three flights of stairs when we get home.

Still, sometimes I am homesick for Munich and our life there. Those were happy years and we had our favorite places that we visited regularly. I miss them, so on this first anniversary of our new home, I got on my bike and rode to Westpark in Munich, one of our favorite haunts before we had the woods at our back door.

Dipping even further into the past, I remembered that there is dogwood in Westpark, not a common tree here in Germany. Where I grew up in New Jersey, the woods were full of them and I knew they should be blooming now. I had my goal for the day.

I planned a route through many streets that I wasn't familiar with. It might not have been the shortest way to Westpark, but I love to discover new neighborhoods, small connecting pathways, unexpected parks only the size of a block and insider shortcuts.

The weather was perfect. Fortunately it was a weekday and the park wasn't crowded. The first spring blossoms were gone and it was too early for the rose garden to be in bloom, but I wasn't disappointed. The pink and white dogwoods were lovely.

It was a happy and satisfying ride. How nice it is to be able to ride into the past and back again and it's only 40 kilometers.

Not related to my ride, but gone home.

RIP Little Richard

January has been kind to us so far ... knock on wood. We haven't seen a single snowflake and have had plenty of sunny days. It's cold, yes, but not often below zero and I am managing to get out on my bike often. This year my goal is not only to ride as often as possible but to increase my mileage. Nuff said. I won't commit myself here to what my km goal is. But I have one.

This is not the end-of-the-month post, that is yet to come with more pictures, stats - kilometers.

"we haven't seen a single snowflake"

That was yesterday. Today we got some snowflakes.

It was an abrupt transition from +30°C at 10 pm in Bangkok to 0°C at midday a day later. But we aren’t letting that deter us! Our local bicycle club as of this winter has introduced winter rides. We were away for the first three, but on this frosty but sunny January day we decided to join them. Actually, I felt obliged since on a warm afternoon last summer I had  asked if the club also rode in the winter. It was an innocent question but Sebastian, our group leader, took it seriously and initiated the "Eisbärtouren".

Yesterday when we met it was -2°C and Sebastian had planned a 35 km ride. So far my winter rides have been at the most 15 km, usually more like six or seven, nothing to brag about but just enough to make me feel good about being out. I was surprised to see that 12 hardy cyclists turned up! We rode a good 25 km before we stopped for lunch at a Greek restaurant for warmth and energy. The remaining ten were then no problem.

On our way home from a walk on dusty tracks leading to the temples, we got a chance to observe first hand how roads are constructed today, probably not only in Bagan but in all of Myanmar. I usually don't like to take pictures of people without asking, but for these shots I found a good spot where I could unobtrusively capture the scene with my zoom lens.

For lunch we went to the closest restaurant, the one right next door that we visited on our first day here. They only serve curry, to foreigners at least, although it looks like the Burmese at the other tables have different things on their plates. But four kinds of curry - beef, fish, lamb and chicken - is easily understood. The curry itself is a small dish with three modest sized pieces of meat or fish in a puddle of oily sauce. This is then accompanied by side-dishes of stewed eggplant, fermented bamboo, spicy tomato puree, dried fish fried with onions, green beans and a bowl of broth. A pot of rice is placed on the table, you help yourself. Perhaps the fermented bamboo shoots are an acquired taste and probably the smell of a stinky French cheese is just as unappetizing to a Burmese as the smell of the fermented bamboo shoots is to us. All the little dishes make a nice array to look at, perhaps not my favorite Asian food but good enough and it all seems to be very authentic.
So perhaps if we haven't seen as many temples and pagodas as we wished, I feel the lethargy imposed on us by my illness has given us time to take in the flavor of our surroundings.

For today we choose a different group of temples to investigate. We are again lucky that it is cloudy and cool for our walk. A blue sky might be nicer for pictures but being exposed to the baking sun not so nice for us.

The paths leading to the sights are a mixture of red dust and sand, sometimes loose and deep. I wouldn't want to have to ride any kind of two-wheeled vehicle here, with or without a motor. But these paths or minor roads don't just lead to the historic sites but also to villages and there is light traffic.

It rained all morning, strange for this time of year. In the afternoon the sky remained overcast and the air cool. It was good weather for walking. These pictures are all of scenes closeby, places we walked to and probably nothing on a tourist's itinerary.

Although we have been close to this legendary river since we arrived in Myanmar, today was the first time we saw it. That was at sundown, but let's start the narrative at the beginning of the day.

Yesterday I finished my prescribed antibiotic, but I wasn't well yet, not by a long shot. Time for a doctor. We trotted off to Bagan's Global Care International Clinic, its name grander than the building itself. But I got to see a doctor who spoke good English, took his time to listen to me and made a very competent impression altogether. I left with a bagfull of medications, including antibiotics. I don't know what's in all those little yellow, white and blue pills they gave me, but I'm taking them all, no questions asked.

Both Janos and I were relieved to have things under control and in the evening I felt up to a walk to the banks of the Irrawaddy. We got there at dusk, as the sun was setting. When the river came into view, we gasped. It was a splendid sight.

We flew out of Mandalay yesteray and now are in Bagan. This should be a highlight of our trip.

That's a lot of temples. We'll be happy looking at a few. For our first day and to get acquainted with the lay of the land, we got in a tuktuk and had him drive us to some of the major sights. There were lots of people at the temeples we visited, mostly locals it seemed, we didn't see a lot of foreigners. They livened up the scenes of old stones.