Solid Block of Ise

The surest sign of spring is children on bicycles. At least that’s the norm up here in northern Sweden. As soon as it’s bare enough to bike, the kids will take out their bikes and start driving around like tiny madmen.

I don’t know if there’s any last gasp of winter left, but I do know that right now there’s about twenty kids roaming around the courtyard with their bikes. They’re shouting and making up games as they go along. There are older kids, there are younger kids. Some are so young they still have their training-wheels on, but everyone is pedaling and trying to keep up with each other. The energy is quite furious, almost palpable.

All this despite the fact that the weather is grey and sullen, and the temperature is only 2 degrees above zero on the celsius-scale.

But you know what really makes me happy every time I look out the window and see these bandits?

The fact that there’s such a wide variety of ethnics represented. There are kids who are browner than pure chocolate. There are kids of asian ethnicity. There are the kids of the typical pale swedish-nordic ethnicity. There’s kids with a decidedly middle-eastern origin. There are even children whose ethnicity I cannot make out. I know that at least two of the children down there barely speak swedish and communicate with the rest of the crowd in some pidgin-mix of broken swedish, english and their native language.

And I think that is great. They’re all playing along, without a thought in the world as to the color of the skin of their playmates. Not even the boundary of languages is an issue. The only thing important is to have the time of your life on your bicycle, whether this bike is brand-new or a hand-me-down.

Governments of the world could learn a lot from these kids.

(on a sidenote, all the kids have helmets. That’s good considering a substantial amount of gravel cover the walkways and this is probably quite slippery when biking)

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