Annebeth Vis has lived in Barcelona for over five years. She works as a freelance journalist for Dutch online and printed media. For Like-a-Local she takes tourists on the Avantgarde Shopping Tour. Annebeth shares a flat in the centre of the city, just off the famous Ramblas.

My first years in Barcelona I was a lonely biker in between cars, buses and taxis. Not always easy: people did not react to my little bell, biking routes that all of a sudden stopped. I smiled at every other biker I bumped into. It made me feel part of something: the biking part of the population.
With the years Barcelona has become a bike friendly city. Increasing parking spaces, more biking routes, traffic signs for bikes. That was nice until two months ago. Bicing introduced – I must admit they did smell a great opportunity – the bike as a substitute for bus and metro for every citizen in Barcelona. You buy a ticket that enables you to pick up a bike at any Bicing parking to leave it later somewhere else in the city. And it works. At some locations bikes are always gone and others are stuffed with them (a special Bicing team redistributes them all day long). I cannot imagine Barcelona without the red and white Bicing bikes anymore. However I still enjoy meeting other bikers around the city, it becomes more and more annoying to share my biking space with all these beginners that cross the footpath as if they were slalom skiing and seem to have never heard of changing roads, sticking out your hand to show direction and using the bike bell. If it were up to me biking-through-Barcelona could have kept on being something exotic. But for whoever is looking for a cheap en extremely trendy local experience Bicing is a great concept. So leave the tourist bus as it is and use a bike to hop on and hop off.

Annebeth

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