Life Posts · HookRace Blog

Staying in Taiyuan, China

2026-09-14T00:00:00+02:00

We live in Heidelberg, Germany. About once a year we travel to my wife’s hometown of Taiyuan, the capital of the Shanxi province in China, to visit my parents-in-law. Our most recent visit was in spring of this year, for two months. In this post I’ll talk about my experiences of regularly staying in Taiyuan since 2019.

Source: Wikipedia

Getting There

Currently Germans can stay for 30 days in China without a visa. Since we stayed in Mainland China for the entire two months, we couldn’t make use of it this year unfortunately. Last year we did a quick trip to Hong Kong, so we had two separate 30-day periods.

Luckily we live pretty close to the Frankfurt airport, which has direct flights to Beijing using Air China:

From Beijing airport we cross the city by subway to the train station, which is slightly challenging with a stroller and heavy luggage:

From there it’s a 2.5 hour trip by high speed train, recently upgraded to 350 km/h. Since the trains are pretty cheap and convenient they are quite popular, so you have to book a ticket early for popular times and fast trains:

I haven’t seen a single train being delayed so far, which is refreshing after having ridden trains regularly for about 15 years in delay-plagued Germany. The high speed rail network of China is amazing in general, with more high speed tracks existing inside of China than outside:

Source: Wikipedia

The train stations function a lot like airports though, so there are security controls and a line to check into the platform before you can enter the train. There was a technical issue for a few seconds right after we went through the ticket check:

City

The Taiyuan area is famous for coal and steel, similarly to the Ruhr area in Germany. You can still see a lot of industry, including a huge steel production facility in our backyard and coal refinement:

Solar has seen a big boom in China, here’s a random hill covered in solar cells:

Taiyuan boasts a population of 4-5 million, making it a similar size to Berlin. Yet it seems to be widely unknown, at least I had never heard of it before meeting my wife. There are a lot of huge cities in China after all. While China itself is not growing in population anymore, but shrinking, people from villages and smaller cities are moving to larger cities, so Taiyuan is still growing at ~1.7% per year. Compare that to Heidelberg’s measly ~0.4% yearly growth.

Shanxi is not at China’s coast, but a bit inland. This has cut it off from a lot of the recent boom China’s coastal cities have received thanks to access to international shipping. Historically Taiyuan played a much larger role in China and was the capital of many dynasties. Unfortunately following the Cultural Revolution there isn’t much left of historic buildings. What looks like historic buildings in the center of Taiyuan often turns out to be replicas:

Nevertheless Taiyuan has some actual ancient sights like the Jinci temple and Twin Pagoda Temple. Pingyao Ancient City is also only 30 minutes by train.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of tourism or international travel to Taiyuan in general. This year I’ve seen a handful of people from outside of East Asia, in the years before it was even less. When I looked for some information on the city, I couldn’t find much in English online, and what I could find wasn’t that kind. I can imagine that life in the villages is indeed less interesting:

Pollution

While we’re talking about the bad sides, air pollution can be tough, especially during the winter. Since I don’t enjoy cycling in -20°C either, I’m now avoiding going to Taiyuan in winter:

In recent years the pollution has been getting better though, spring is usually dry with nice weather. Occasionally there are dust storms from the Gobi desert, which are unpleasant to be in, and about the only time you really need an air purifier at home. But on most days you can see far and the air seems fine:

Fen River

The Fen river (or Fenhe, literally “Large river”) that runs through the city is unfortunately quite polluted, so swimming in it is not advised. The waterfront has been made into a huge park of sorts, with walking paths and cycling paths along the river for the main part of the city. This allows crossing through the city from north to south or vice versa undisturbed by cars or scooters:

Interestingly the Fen river doesn’t carry enough water naturally. Taiyuan has also been plagued by the entire city sinking by more than 2 meters since 1949 from the groundwater lowering by about 70 meters, mostly caused by intensive agriculture, coal mining and heavy industry. This trend has recently been partially reversed. Planting trees and reducing water usage seem to have helped, but the major driver has been the Wanjiazhai Water Control Project, which redirects over a billion cubic meters of water per year from the Yellow river to the Fen river.

China seems to have a thing for huge infrastructure projects, we’ve already talked a bit about the high speed railway network, you’ll also see some nice looking bridges later.

Some older men seem not to be disturbed by the river’s pollution. During runs I’ve quickly learnt where the hot spots of naked swimming are (and to avoid them). There is a nice looking public pool next to the river, so you can still safely swim.

Traffic & Transportation

Car traffic during rush hour seems bad, but luckily we rarely had to go through it. The experience of staying in a city during vacation isn’t representative of actually living and working there after all. On smaller roads there are more electric scooters than cars. Delivery drivers make up a huge fraction of the e-scooters. Gasoline-powered scooters are heavily restricted in the inner city.

Street signs include a N/E/S/W designation to show which direction the street is going.

With a stroller taking a bus is more convenient than using bicycles. It is also extremely cheap at 0.5 RMB per ride, or about 0.06 €. This is literally the only photo/video I found including a bus, featuring some bonus sheep coming down from the mountains:

Two subway lines have been opened in the city so far, one going from North to South (opened in 2020), the other going to the airport (opened in 2025).

For navigation Amap works great, outside the city I’ve also been relying on CoMaps. Unfortunately Amap only shows exact arrival times at bus stations when set to Chinese, not in English. Luckily searching still works with Pinyin (romanization system) even when the UI is set to be in Chinese.

The bus and subway stop running pretty early in the evening, so we had to also use ridesharing. Didi and Amap are the usual solutions and cost about 1-5 € for our usual trips through the city.

There is a (barely-international) airport in Taiyuan, which mostly connects to other Chinese cities, including Hong Kong and Macau. Last year there also were direct flights to Thailand, but they don’t seem to exist anymore.

Parks & Running

My parents-in-law live right next to the Forest Park, which is a park trying to emulate being in a forest. This makes it quite different from most other parks in Taiyuan, which look more artificial and often have playgrounds. Parks are for free, (very) actively maintained, and are popular for all kinds of social activities like dancing, singing, sports or jianzi:

The area surrounding the lake in the Forest Park is a hotspot for daytime camping in Taiyuan:

Soon I started running in the Forest Park, where one round is a convenient 6 km. Occasionally a group of soldiers from a nearby camp would join me.

After a while Forest Park became a bit repetitive though, but luckily it’s right next to the Fen river, so I switched to the paths next to the river instead for longer runs:

One day I wanted to run a long distance and went all the way north to the North University of China, which sits where the Fen river starts running into the city. I wanted to go further, but there were ominous signs of the area being restricted by military, and a few people standing guard at the path. Quoting Wikipedia:

The university played an important role in the weaponry development and personnel training for the People’s Liberation Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War.

Running south was easier, there is even a dedicated walking/running path directly on the river, going pretty far south. So you don’t even run into cyclists:

Unfortunately pedestrian-only areas are usually blocked off from bicycles and scooters in a way that also won’t allow wheelchairs or strollers to enter.

Cycling into the Mountains

Nevertheless, with running I wouldn’t get that far. My father-in-law bought a nice mountain bike and had it retrofitted into an e-bike. The total cost was 500 € for what I’d consider a pretty nice bicycle that you’d probably have to pay 3-4x as much for in Germany. Since the motor sits in the front wheel it rides pretty well as a non-electric bike too:

Annoyingly the speed limit on the entire cycling path next to the Fen river is 15 km/h, which is unreasonably slow even with a non-motorized bicycle:

I quickly discovered that the mountains to the west are the highlight of Taiyuan. My first trip into them went up to the 2nd Fenhe reservoir:

The small building visible in the above picture is the nicest spot that is reachable by a proper road:

There were multiple really nice spots on the ridges of the 2nd Fen reservoir, so I kept coming back for them. Some of the paths were muddy or made of loose stone, with apparently no traffic and barely any visitors.

Then I started exploring the mountain ridges from north to south. Interestingly driving into the mountains by car requires pre-registration and signing into a list. Since I arrived by bicycle they always just waved me through. Here’s a view from what is apparently a new tourist spot up on the mountain, looking down on the Fen river:

Once I accidentally rode into a construction site on the mountain, and only realized after reaching the end of it, where I was greeted by a fence blocking access to the road. There were no signs warning of the construction before it, from what I can tell, but I might not have understood them anyway.

Another time only one lane of the road was closed for construction in the mountains, but on the other lane the road traffic was still not moving. Someone waved at me to just ride past on my bicycle, which is when I noticed an elderly woman sitting in the middle of the remaining lane holding up a sign.

I have barely met any other cyclists in the mountains, but this might also be caused by me usually riding early in the morning during work days. As I kept going further south I discovered the Mengshan Giant Buddha statue.

I realized that I had cycled just past it without seeing it once, so on the next trip I was determined to get to it. Apparently I was too determined… With CoMaps I found a small path that went over some mountain ridges. The path was barely rideable by bicycle because it mostly consisted of loose stones and was pretty steep:

Finally I ended up in the Mengshan Giant Buddha area, cycled once around it and finally went in. Some workers kept asking me questions, but with my bad Chinese I didn’t manage to understand what they were talking about. I noticed that the closer I got to the statue the more it looked like a park, so I parked my bicycle and walked up the rest of the way:

When I walked back to my bicycle it had disappeared, and there were two park workers standing there instead. I got picked up by them, they delivered me and my bicycle to some guards who arrived with a car and drove me to the end of what I had now figured out was a paid park. Apparently no one other than me thinks to go through some tiny mountain paths to get in there, so the sight’s park entrance from the mountains was neither closed nor staffed and I hadn’t noticed that I entered it accidentally. Luckily I managed to explain what had happened to the guards and they let me go on my merry way.

Riding further south also meant I went past a lot of the impressive bridges crossing the Fenhe:

The Fenhe path is not well connected to other infrastructure, so even getting up to the bridges often means having to carry the bicycle up stairs:

The general pattern seems to be that China likes doing huge infrastructure projects, but actually integrating them properly gets missed sometimes.

Even further south the mountain roads were much better (actually paved, brand new road opened in 2019), with a kind of famous spiral mountain bridge on the Tianlongshan Highway. The only other visitors I saw there were a group of 4 women who stopped their car and started screaming into the sky:

Mud and rock slides as well as some flooding on the roads seem to be a common occurrence, I noticed them after each strong rain:

I also kept running into clearly man-made loess caves, so-called yaodong. They are close to villages, so they might actually connect to the more modern houses there. Quoting Wikipedia:

As of the early 2000s, between 30 and 40 million people in northern China still lived in yaodongs, a number rapidly decreasing as millions move to more modern dwellings nearby or move away as part of urbanization in China.

Graves in random places on the mountains are also a common sight:

I didn’t have as much success getting into the mountains on the east, the road was blocked and the guard utterly uninterested in explaining why:

Restrictions and the Internet

For using the internet as a foreigner, relying on Google, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, etc., the Great Firewall is annoying, but using a cheap Hong Kong eSIM from 3HK easily circumvents it. My interpretation is that China is only trying to prevent their own citizens from accessing the wider internet and doesn’t care about visitors.

During the evening connections to Europe are noticeably slower, I guess the total bandwidth for traffic outside of China is just pretty limited. Chinese people might not mind much since they mostly use local services anyway.

For payment Alipay and WeChat Pay work well, and both are literally accepted and preferred by anyone, including the smallest street food shops. It can be connected to a credit card and at least for me the credit card fees were waived every time for some reason. You have to upload your passport in the app to verify your identity, which is slightly disconcerting, but seems to become more common in Western apps nowadays too. You can still get around with cash, but shop owners might scramble to get change from a colleague.

The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center has been in operation since 1966. It’s located about 300 km from the city and has regular launches. Unfortunately watching them seems not to be allowed, especially for foreigners.

Language, School & Work

My Chinese is very basic, so I have trouble getting around. Unfortunately most people in Taiyuan don’t speak any English. I have noticed that school-age kids would mostly just say rote phrases in English, but not actually be able to communicate with me.

School and work schedules seem crazy to me, with both kids and adults staying at school/work all day. I can’t imagine learning or working for that many hours in the day, my brain would just shut off after a few hours and I’d have to switch to something lighter.

There seems to be a huge difference in the quality of schools, to the point where some famous public schools would take over other public schools to lend them some of their prestige. Parents move (or pretend to move) to an area to give their children access to a good school. The craziest traffic I’ve seen is in front of a school, with scooters, people and cars bringing the entire street to a stop during pickup times. I couldn’t even get through on foot.

There is also barely any time off, so when weekend or holidays hit all the nice spots are overcrowded. See the parking traffic at Forest Park for example:

Construction

New buildings are constructed at break-neck speed in Taiyuan, which adds as many people every two years as live in Heidelberg in total (150k). Work on construction sites happens during all times of the day, even in the middle of the night. In a two-month stay I can easily watch the progress of multiple large residential buildings going up. Since my first visit in 2019 the entire skyline behind this view of the Forest Park has changed noticeably:

2019 2026

Out of curiosity we visited a newly built apartment for sale, and it feels strange to get such a luxury apartment for such a cheap price. Top floor (around 30) with 370 m², with a view overlooking one of the nicest parks in the city, for just 900k €. It’s not the exact one as in this video, but it gives you an idea:

Building quality is much lower than in Germany, with drafts coming in from the 2-paned windows. Insulation is probably not a major concern either, and it kind of makes sense when even electricity only costs about 0.06 €/kWh, or about 6 times less than in Germany.

Some buildings are also just erected without any official permission, so the people living there can’t even register since the city considers their address as non-existent.

Food

The food in Taiyuan is amazing. I like noodle dishes and that’s what Shanxi is famous for. The northern part of China is way more about wheat and millet, which is what they’ve been growing for thousands of years.

But you’re not restricted to local dishes of course. You can have all kinds of East Asian cuisines, including the full variety of Chinese regions. There are so many restaurants that on a single street you’ll find more variety of foods than in all of Heidelberg.

Prices are pretty low at restaurants, a normal dinner would set us back 3-8 € per adult.

People regularly bring their own drinks, for example bubble tea or alcohol, or even food from another restaurant, to the restaurant they’re eating at:

My favorite is eating street food instead of sitting down in a restaurant. A few years ago most of the improvised street food stalls were banned from the city, but they seem to have made a comeback. I seem not to be alone in liking them, since they are pretty crowded on evenings and during the weekend. The highlight is lamb skewers for 0.25 - 0.5 € each:

The “Food Street” of Taiyuan features fake Ming/Qing dynasty style buildings and has lots of street food available. But there are also smaller hot spots around the city. Just taking a bus crossing through the city in the evening you’ll run past lots of places where people are sitting/standing outside eating street food.

In recent years Mixue has gotten extremely popular. You can now find the shops on many street corners, selling ice cream (0.25 €), lemonade (0.5 €) and bubble tea (1 €). Quoting Wikipedia:

At the end of 2025, it operated almost 60,000 stores in China and overseas, making it the world’s largest food-service chain by number of stores.

Attractions

This year we went to a bunch of playgrounds, theme parks and other entertainment since our son could enjoy them much more now that he’s three years old. A highlight was the Fantawild Oriental Heritage theme park, with theaters, rollercoasters and lots of other attractions:

Conclusion

I feel like I’ve been extremely lucky to get to spend months every year in Taiyuan, which I now consider a hidden gem. It has easy access to my favorite foods, great running paths and mountain roads for cycling:

I’m wondering if I would have started to like any city I get thrown into, being generally optimistic and curious might play a role. It’s not like I think Heidelberg is any worse now, it’s just great in a myriad of different ways. But that might be for another post.

Immich has a nice feature of showing a map of where I’ve taken photos, roughly corresponding to areas of Taiyuan I’ve been to:

You can reach me at dennis@felsing.org.

€9 Ticket

2022-08-20T00:00:00+02:00

As a relief for rising energy costs and inflation Germany is offering nearly-free public transportation for the months of June, July and August. For just €9 per month you can take any kind of regional public transportation in all of Germany. That’s basically everything except the IC/ICE for long distance. This means that a monthly ticket is now as cheap as what I would normally pay for a single route. In this post I want to talk about my experiences with this €9 ticket.

Update 2022-09-01: The €9 ticket ended yesterday without a similar replacement system in place. So many people are again back to paying about €100 per month for much smaller regional tickets instead (see for example this German Reddit thread. Financially it makes more sense for me personally to go back to driving. (I hope the gasoline in the car is still good after three months.) My hope is that these three months will stay in people’s minds in Germany and shape the future of public transportation to be cheaper and simpler:

Image via Reddit

Train Stations

In the above graphic you can see the train stations in our area. Since we are situated in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region the railway network is pretty good here.

(map made with umap, routes made with GraphHopper)

The closest train stop from us is St. Ilgen-Sandhausen at 2 km distance. It offers direct connections to the cities of Heidelberg (160k inhabitants), Mannheim (309k), Karlsruhe (313k), Darmstadt (159k) and Frankfurt (753k). For other directions I prefer going to a different train station since switching times are either too long or there is too much risk of missing the connecting train. Only 89% of regional trains are on time in Germany, with some routes and stations having much worse rates. This is a far cry from Switzerland’s 95% punctuality with an even stricter definition of 3 minutes versus 5 minutes delay in Germany.

Another closeby train station we commonly use is HD-Weststadt/Südstadt at 6 km distance, which is good to cycle and can also be reached via Tram. Occasionally I used Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof as well as Wiesloch-Walldorf, both at slightly under 10 km distance, which are a bit larger and thus are used as stops for Regional-Express trains. These go faster than the Regionalbahn and S-Bahn trains and thus also have fewer stops.

Cycling Trips

The above map contains some of the cycling trips I took by combining them with the €9 ticket. (map made with umap, routes made with GraphHopper)

Last time I posted about cycling and work was about commuting by bicycle for a year. I kept this up and was super happy with this way of getting to SAP’s headquarter in Walldorf and the included exercise. After a while I moved together with my wife and my bike commute lengthened to 10 km each direction, which was still perfectly fine. Then Covid forced me in March of 2020 to work from home I switched to regular cycling trips in the afternoon since I started working early in the morning, in order to have meetings with colleagues in Korea and China. Two 50 km cycling trips per week got me to the same level as the daily commute used to do, and I have a nice route I regularly take, which covers a lot of forest and lake.

In January I switched to a new job at Yugabyte. As the database we develop is distributed, so are the people I work with. Since most meetings fall into US times, I am now working more during the afternoon and evening. This means my cycling trips moved to the morning instead.

Previously I had a job ticket for three years, but other than the €9 ticket it limits the range I can take public transportation in, so that many of my destinations would be barely outside of the covered range. When looking at a map of Germany with all the different transport associations, each with their own tickets, prices and rules, I feel reminded of historical maps of the Holy Roman Empire:

Good luck figuring out what ticket to get to combine with your job ticket. Luckily the €9 ticket changed this, at least temporarily, making life simpler.

I used the ticket during the working days to discover new cycling routes. By cycling one direction and taking a direct train connection back, I can cover nearly twice the distance as usual with the same starting and stopping point. With this method I took many routes I had never taken before, discovering beautiful cycling paths along the Neckar river for example. Luckily the trains are not too crowded during working days, especially outside of rush hour. The cycling usually takes around three times as long as the train ride back.

The image above shows an almost empty train during a working day.

Even with a single train connection things can go wrong though. One time the train in front of ours started burning and so we got delayed for an unknown time. But since I had my bicycle with me, that meant I could just cycle back the rest of the way and get some extra exercise for free. If I was really out of energy I could have waited in the train, but often busses are used as a replacement, and bicycles on busses don’t fit well.

The weather was unusually dry the last months, the last few days had the first few drops of rain I remember since the beginning of June. This is of course bad for nature here, as I saw at the Rhine river, which is much lower than usual. For cycling it’s quite good though, only got wet once.

Jogging

This amount of cycling of course meant that my bicycle had to get some repairs done. While I had it at the repair shop, I tried out jogging from Heidelberg back to my home town Leimen. The route goes through the “Kleiner Odenwald” forest for nearly the entire way, and the rest are some fields. It goes through Heidelberg’s highest mountain, the Königstuhl, with a nice view of the city and surrounding area.

The “Ladder to Heaven” in the beginning with its 1300 steps accounts for most of the elevation and is still too tough for me to do at faster than walking speed. After I got my bicycle back I still kept doing this jogging route a few times per week.

Nearby Excursions

There are lots of cities and nice nature nearby. So we used public transportation for excursions on every weekend. It was noticable that the trains were crowded, and at times people couldn’t even enter the train anymore. When going to the cinema we noticed that we should really catch the last train at 22:30, since the next connection would take all night.

One time the train back from Frankfurt was late, then got cancelled. The next train was also delayed, and now overcrowded because it had twice the passengers. Unfortunately it took me too long to realize that with more than 20 minutes delay, we should be able to take high speed ICE trains as a replacement and get the cost reimbursed by Deutsche Bahn.

You still need to wear masks as a Covid prevention on public transportation in Germany. This is basically the only remaining occasion, other than at the Doctor’s office, where you have to wear masks. Even with all the travel using public transportation and basically no distancing we haven’t caught Covid as far as we are aware based on symptoms and some rapid tests.

Eating Out

My wife picked out many great restaurants in nearby cities for us to try out. By car it would not make sense to just drive to another city for a dinner, but using public transportation we had no problem spending an hour on a train, where you can comfortable talk or surf the web, to reach our destinations. This probably has a really good economic effect on restaurants and cafes, many were so fully packed that we got the last seats or had to reserve beforehand.

Family Visits

For trips to cities and cycling trips we mostly take direct train connections. That usually works quite well. To visit family however the destinations are smaller villages, so the connections are worse and there is no direct connection at all. So a 40 minute drive turns into a 2 hour train ride with 3 different trains instead. Coincidentally this is the same time I need for the route by bicycle.

There is a relatively high chance of missing a connecting train, or of getting stuck in the middle of the route. One time a truck crashed into the train bridge, so our train couldn’t continue. Instead of waiting around for an hour or two we took the train back home and, for the only time during these three months so far, had to switch to the car to keep our timeline. At least the highway was quite empty, there seems to be some conflicting data on whether the €9 ticket actually has an effect on reducing car traffic though.

Getting Visits

While my wife and I didn’t do any long distance travel using the €9 ticket, others did. I had a co-developer of DDraceNetwork visit all the way from Berlin using the €9 ticket. For people who have time it has been much easier to visit others with the €9 ticket, without having to worry about cost.

While on Vacation

While we didn’t use the €9 ticket to go to a vacation, it was still useful during a car-based vacation. While driving to Berchtesgadener Land we saw a train line that seemed to lead to Berchtesgaden. So we stopped at the closeby train station and spontaneously took the train instead, which lead us through beautiful sceneries.

On the way back from the same vacation we had a stop in Munich. Instead of driving the car all the way into the city center I checked for the closest free Park and Ride garage from the highway. After parking the car there, the train was unfortunately cancelled, so we had to take a bus and metro, but still reached the city center quickly.

After having used public transportation a lot back at home, we also felt more comfortable using it on vacation in other countries, even if it costs a bit more there. So on Mallorca we explored the entire island using the extensive bus network instead of renting a car. The photo above shows the most distant bus stop we reached, at a lighthouse at the end of a long curvy road. Next week we are taking the TGV to Paris, which tops out at 320 km/h and manages the 550 km route in just 2:36, an average of 212 km/h. The image below is luckily not the TGV:

Going to the airport by train worked fine, but we had to get there a few hours earlier in case was some train delay causing us to miss the connecting train. On the way back there indeed was a huge delay, with a train line being closed down for hours. After a slow trickle of information from the train operator, we had to figure out an alternative route on our own, since the DB app was still showing routes that could not be operated for the next few hours because of the train line closure.

Conclusion

There are still two weeks left for the €9 ticket and I’m planning to make the best use of them. So far I’ve been taking a trip on most days, so it’s definitely been worth it and will be missed.

Unfortunately the €9 ticket won’t be prolonged. The high public interest has lead to some plans for a relatively cheap follow-up ticket, but again with some regional limitations for the cheap ticket. Other countries are even implementing entirely free public transport meanwhile, so there is some hope for the future.

One year of cycling to work

2018-02-20T00:00:00+01:00

Exactly on this day, one year ago, I came back from a one month long trip to Taiwan, went straight to work from the airport and immediately moved into a new apartment after work. Since then I have cycled to work nearly every day.

Fullscreen (map made with umap, routes made with GraphHopper)

Alternatives and motivation

Previously I lived in Heidelberg, 15 km from work and usually took the train, only cycling to work about once a week. But my new apartment was significantly closer to work, only 6 km, which takes just 15-20 minutes to cycle, so it became much easier to use the bicycle to get to work every day.

Taking public transportation instead is possible, and takes about 35-40 minutes. I only do that when I want to go to the city straight after work instead of going home first. For me personally public transportation is more useful in combination with the bicycle on longer trips.

Sometimes I take public transportation to work and just walk back in the evening, which can be great for listening to audiobooks.

For about a month I had borrowed a car and sometimes used it to go to work. Without traffic the driving would take 12 minutes, but with traffic it’s usually 15-25 minutes. Additionally I have to get a parking spot and walk further to the office, so using a car doesn’t save time compared to cycling.

Advantages

I remember feeling tired when getting to work early in the morning using public transportation. After all you just keep sitting and standing, never really jump starting the body. While cycling to work I certainly wake up and feel more energetic and focussed when I arrive.

Having a clear separation of work and private life is important for me, both by using different spaces for each as well as having a strict time separation. So after I get out of work and get onto my bicycle I will still be having work-related thoughts circling in my head. But while cycling I might take a quick stop to write down any insights that I have or tasks that I forgot to finish. Then I can finally shut down and clear my brain from work by enjoying the ride, the views and the physical exercise.

I find the simplicity of cycling for locomotion beautiful. I never have to be stuck in a traffic jam, feeling stressed by moving at a snail’s pace. Even if cycling is slower the feeling of making progress is stronger. I never have to be waiting for a late train, a bus that left too early or be stuck inside of a train while there are problems with the power line. In the worst case I can pick up my bicycle and walk around some obstacle or fix a flat tire in a few minutes. Being outside in nature, at least for half an hour every day, feels good.

Combined with the gym at work I feel like I’m getting enough sports to be reasonably fit without having to spend much time on it. I regularly get home from work at 17:00 with all work and sports done and can enjoy the rest of the day without any worry.

When I’m using the bicycle to get to work already, I feel like the barrier to combining this with larger trips is lowered. I occasionally do 40-50 km cycling tours before or after work, depending on the weather and my mood.

Accommodation

At home my bicycle is locked into a room in the basement, making it reasonably secure and still easily accessible. At work we have roofed-over parking spaces for the bicycles with robust metal bars for locking. Some of the cycle racks even have two floors with an easy mechanism for getting your bicycle down from there. When I don’t need my lock I will just leave it there after work for the next day.

Multiple buildings at work have special showers for cyclists. But to be honest I don’t use them after my usual route to work, for three reasons:

It is cooler in the morning.
The distance is short enough.
I cycle slower when going to work in the morning than when going back.

Especially in the summer it is nice to do a two hour cycling trip at 5 am and go straight to work afterwards. Then the showers are a godsend of course.

The journey is the reward

Close to my home I have to cross a red light, which is also where I had the only accident in this year. A car driver ignored my right of way and so I had to break hard and ended up sitting on their hood. But luckily that didn’t result in any injuries or damages. (Edit: I have never had an accident involving a car before, so this is probably an outlier.)

After exiting the industrial area I am riding exclusively on small field roads. Especially in the morning this makes for nice sunrises with fog on parts of the fields. Along the way there is also a fishing lake.

The way tunnels below train tracks, runs over a stream, tunnels below a large street and finally bridges over another large street. This means there are no large intersections where you have to wait or be cautious. In consequence the ride is quite relaxing.

The only potential stop along the way is a small airfield where planes are occasionally landing and starting. But that’s fun to watch, so I don’t mind waiting for a minute or two.

Numbers

There are about 250 work days in a year in Baden-Württemberg, excluding weekends and public holidays. Of those I was missing for 34 days for vacations, being sick and doing home office. On 11 days I used public transportation, on 5 days a car. That leaves 200 days on which I cycled to work.

The distance to work is 6 km each way, so in total I cycled 2400 km just to get to work and back. I need 20 minutes to work and 15 minutes back, so 117 hours were spent cycling.

I had two flat tires, one accident and needed one major part replacement in the entire year. But to be fair I also cycled in my free time and it was the first large replacement my bicycle needed since I started using it 15.000 km ago.

Animal nature

On one day in summer I counted the wild animals that I saw on my short trip to work, which included 4 rabbits, 1 deer with fawn, 1 white stork with young in the nest as well as a group of 21 white storks in the fields. A few weeks ago I was happy to see an elusive black stork flying towards the closeby forest for the first time. On another occurence there was a Heron successfully catching a snake.

Apart from wild animals there are of course many people walking their dogs, and the pet home on the way features lots of dogs behind the fence as well as a few cats walking around outside.

Winter is coming

Appropriate clothing is important since cycling exposes you to wind and precipitation.

In summer a t-shirt and short pants are usually fine. For colder times dual-function pants for office and cycling are great, otherwise jeans also work.

During rains I certainly don’t want to wear jeans. Then I also need to bring another set of clothes to switch to once I’m in the office. The most important measure for rainy days is to have good timing, since I have flexible work times and the rains are usually not equally strong for hours. Weather forecasts can be remarkably inaccurate though.

I use wind-proof jackets and shoes as well as gloves and a balaclava in winter. Snow and ice are rather rare and not so strong here, so they are not a big issue. The above photo was taken two years ago and that represents about the worst winter conditions I ever had to cycle in.

Conclusion

I’ll keep cycling to work in the foreseeable future. I don’t think this post is of much use to anyone, but I had fun reflecting my last year of cycling to work. Thanks for reading. Comments on Hacker News.