17:25. It is early to leave the office. But hey, the International Conference of YFU in Buenos Aires is over, which gives us in the International Secretariat of YFU the opportunity to call it a day at a reasonable time. Being a rather lazy person in some respects, I choose one of the few offices. Quickly in, close the door, close the shutters and change quickly. No worries about windows, because there are none. 10 minutes later, Seba and I are on the way on our bikes. 18 kilometers separate the office in Bethesda from our house on Capitol Hill. Many of you might start wondering, why in the world we would pain ourselves with traveling through the horrendous rush hour traffic of DC. Well, we don't. On the contrary, we choose the biker super highway called Capitol Crescent Trail, a multi use path on a former railroad track. This fabulous path leads us through woods along the Potomac from Massachusettes Avenue to Georgetown (click here to see where the cars would drive through). From there we make our way to Constitution Avenue along the mall back to the Capitol and to our home, only a few blocks away where currently Democrats and W are fighting over the funding of the Iraq war. Constitution Ave is not pleasant if you do not like traffic. However, since I do like zooming passed the cars standing in the daily traffic jam, it is definitely a pleasant ride home.

Now, since all Americans are overweight, only eat fast food and NEVER leave their car, you might think that we are the lonesome weirdos on two wheels. Far from that. We are actually quite lucky since we drive against the traffic. Otherwise we might get stuck in the hordes of bikes that bring their riders into town every day. No wonder, there are more than 7'000 members in the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. Thanks god, our super highway has two lanes. True, the large majority only started biking when it got warmer. But most of them are incredibly fit and thus painfully fast when you want to keep up with them. Every once in a while it is fun, though, to team up with someone and speed towards our destination.

Biking in the city is also very comfy. The roads are in a horrible condition in many places, but after a while you figure out where the biggest pot holes are (even though I am living in the capital of the richest country on the planet, the roads at times remind me more of a back country road in rural Russia...). However, they are a lot wider and therefore leave plenty of room for bikers. In addition, there are plenty of bike lanes (!) and above all car drivers are very considered (if they see you). Different country, different culture. Thus I decided to let go of some principles: traffic lights are mostly part of the city decoration: they are plentiful and they rarely make sense for a biker (or at least their switching patterns). No one seems to mind. Not even the police, as long as you drive carefully. One way streets are as frequent as Starbucks coffee shops (thus more frequent than McDonald's), but none of them are open for bikes. At least not officially. But then again, drivers are considered. Finding a bike shop is not as challenging as I had anticipated. Plus they are fast, cheap and usually impressed with the bike, as it carries various parts which are hard to get in this country. How hard it is, I had to learn the hard way this winter: the halogen light bulb for my front light does not seem to exist here. One would think that such a common part is standardized. Wrong! I tried everything - and ended up importing them from Switzerland. Oh well, there are worse things in life than that.

18:15. We turn into the driveway in the back of our house, Seba presses the garage opener and we simply drive into our garage which is filled with the bike of our landlord and the two bikes we ride. Biking is so much fun in this city!