Bicycle bicycle bicycle

Barcelona has one of those public bike systems where you get a card and then you can take a bike from one of the many bike stations around the city and then you return it to any other station you want. Bicing, they call it. I like it, but I would have been perfectly happy to like it in theory while continuing to walk everywhere. But then a colleague offered to loan me his card and I immediately felt a bunch of imagined social obligation to actually use the card. Sunday seemed like my best bet to try it out without a ton of traffic to complicate things, so I checked out a bike to ride my lame ass to work for a while. The first problem was that I couldn't lock the seat in place. My being incredibly short means that having the seat as low as it could possibly go wasn't a huge problem, but having it want to turn sideways every time I moved my legs or ass was not ideal. The second problem was that the back brake on the bike barely worked at all. (As far as I can tell, it's somewhere between a huge pain in the ass and impossible to exchange a bike for a different one once you've checked it out.) The third problem was that I don't really know which streets have bike lanes, or which traffic rules you need to follow on a bike, or which particular direction is most likely to be the source of the next motorcycle that comes screaming by out of nowhere. I managed not to crash into anything, and I only almost fell over once. I'm not sure that twenty minutes of Bicing made up for the fact that I spent hours at work on this particular Sunday, but it was a little adventure in any case.