We first noticed the rat two weeks ago. These days it’s believable that winter is upon us. Grass and rooves stay covered in hoarfrost all day long, and we stay inside in front of the hot fireplace. The living room has got the last single-pane window in the house, a large panoramic one into the garden, […]
Author: Leon Friederichs
Drawing ugliness
A few days ago I was having a conversation with Stefan about stained glass windows, like those jewels of my and Nelson’s friend Mehoffer in Fribourg or the less readable ones in the Sainte-Chapelle. At one point we were both fumbling for a word – what do you call the space between four columns, several […]
È fatto
For weeks have we been silent: No time to write in these hurried last days of the trip, no ideas what to write after having returned home. Yes, we are back: Nelson in Małopolska and I in Westfalen. This trip has been harder than the one we did from Münster to Kraków in 2015: Physically […]
Ad break – Visit France! Visit Switzerland!
We’re awfully sorry for writing less and less; this affliction comes naturally with having just too much to cycle and to look at and too many people to talk to and drinks to down. You people keep asking us about precisely the spots we haven’t covered in detail, so here’s a quick recap of what we’ve […]
Ascent and Fuga
High atop Genova there is a grand statue of the virgin Mary, nigh as tall as the Christ of Świebodzin, looming over the faraway sea … nearly as high we had to climb to our Genovese couchsurfer, but, all of a sudden, without any effort: we are still suspicious whether it’s just been something we’ve […]
How to visit cities and alienate hosts
Travel styles differ so vastly. I remember well how I went to Lisboa for the first time: Several people, including but not limited to two different couchsurfing hosts, told me right away that the six days I had planned to stay were way too much. I’d get bored, the city would be too small, even […]
Long-term record broken – reckless cyclists cycle on
Summer 2015: Nelson and I cycle to Kraków and argue about every city except for two. We do agree on which was the most beautiful and on which was the weirdest one, the latter having been Bückeburg (the older amongst our readers may remember it as the ancient capital of the county of Schaumburg), Bückeburg, […]
Notes from behind the counter
“Le pontissalien” is the local hipster café: sterile atmosphere, furniture in a poisonous green, one popular offer consisting of lukewarm water with a separately served teabag. Featured on farfromready today: its barkeeper. 2nd of August, 14:00 Three men on three bikes are walking to and fro in front of the café. Finally one comes in and […]
Missive from the midway
Fancy lunch – tuna and wiener sausages on, for lack of baguette, crumbly biscuits – in the vast emptiness between Châtillon and Dijon. Appropriately, the closest village is named “Salives”. Nothing says “bike trip” like absurd last meals before insurmountable climbs of (censored, so as not to frighten my companions) metres. Imagine, a landslide would […]
Enter Cyclist No. 3
Paris is a dream to cycle in. As a Münster native I’m used to rude cyclists and tough laws – here you don’t have the tough laws, so you’re free to race through one-way roads in the wrong direction, cutting off some motorbike’s way, going over red and getting some pedestrian bloke to do a […]