A Better Way to Get Around a City: Bikes

Eindhoven
We landed yesterday afternoon in a City in southern Holland called Eindhoven and one of the first things we noticed as we got off was the bikes and the transit layout. This town is really quiet and was easy to navigate, there were no traffic jams, and not many cars on the road...yet there were ~20 story buildings, and 750,000 people living there. How did they do it?

Everybody rides bikes to get around town. The city is layed out to allow for bikes everywhere very easily and conviently. There are seperate lanes for petestrians, bikes, cars and busses at some places. Tunnels and special bike traffic lights make it easy to cross intersections. All of Holland is like layed out similar to this.

I think it is rad! The results of this system:

• Less traffic
• More healthy people
• Less polution
• More people that can wheelie really well
• Faster for intermediate/short distances
• More biker gangs using their chain locks to terrorize the town
  
• Better mulit-tasking while biking
• More bike accidents
• Dumb tourists that don't know bike ediquette (we only got honked at once)
• A lot of people on one bike

Amsterdam
With a more bustleing city, it was way tough for us to get a handle (pun intended) on navigating a city on a bike. We never knew when it was ok to cross when the bike light was red; other people would go on the red light and be fine...then right when we try, the cars would start going.

Although difficult to navigate, it was fun. I think I would love it if I knew the town really well and could just cruise to where I was going.

A Sore Butt
We rode around 50 km today on a trip out to an old fishing village north of Amsterdam. Originally we thought the clunkers we rented would be nice b/c they had a big, cushoned seat. We were wrong.

Here is our journey on google maps.




View Larger Map

A 6' X 2' spot is all I need

Over the past few days Andrew and I have been sleeping anywhere and everywhere trying to save a little cash for the rest of our journey. Here is a list of a few places:

• Victoria Park, Bath, England (behind a couple trees so the joggers didn't see us)

• Mark's Hotel room floor, next to his pull out bed, London (The $500/night rooms only bed was a hide away)
• On floor underneath train seats, from S. Whales to Holyhead

• On floor by the stairs on an Irish Ferry from Holyhead to Dublin
• Ghetto hostel in Dublin, under the train tracks with illegal migrant workers
  
• On a nice couch in Holland
  

Europe Has Begun

Well...with ridiculously expensive internet fees over here, I haven't had much time to write about our adventures, but we definitely have had some.

We spent time in London, Bath, and Bristol and are now in Dublin. I'll write more about sleeping in a park in Bath, getting kicked out of the Tate modern and others later :D

Pictures will follow as well.

Cheers!

Saving the World

A few extra hours of light
Ghana is 5 degrees off from the cross hares that are made by the prime meridian and the equator and therefore there is almost exactly 12 hours of sun. That means that year round there is about 11 hours of darkness each day. If you are in one of the many African villages where it is prohibitively expensive to have wires run across the jungle/savanna/dessert what would you do during the 4 hours of darkness you spend awake each day?

In Ghana, village schools with out electricity don't have much light in the mud huts and often require learning by audible memorization. Especially during the rainy season, lighting inside schools is poor and adds another challenge in the learning process.

How can these issues be resolved? Energy is all around, it just needs to be transferred into usable electrical energy. Kids have lots of energy. Why not tap into that by bleeding off a little energy from a merry go round that they are pushing?

The BYU Manufacturing Engineering Technology Capstone Team
Empower Playgrounds Inc has given us the task of coming over here to Ghana, work in a job shop here with a team of of metal workers, carpenters etc to build the first merry go round that will light up a village that has no way to get electricity besides batteries. Tomorrow we will install the toy that we have spent 4 days working on in a small village school called Essam. I'm excited to see how the children react to the first playground equipment they have ever seen.

Not only will this provide light, but hopefully, as they see the engineering that goes into this, they will be inspired to learn more about renewable energy and have a better understanding of the way energy can be converted from food to mechanical to electrical energy.

Documenting the Project
Sunday night a BYU film crew and a photographer arrived here in Ghana to shoot a BYU commercial and news story. Yesterday they took lots of picture and film of fabricating the merry go round and today they went out to the village to shoot before installing the MGR. We will install it tomorrow. The commercial will be aired during televised sporting events and on KBYU. Pictures taken will be on BYU's homepage and there will be a audio slide show online as well (Like the football ones). All of this publicity for Empower Playgrounds Inc will help the not-for-profit get off the ground and will provide the means of getting power to a multitude of villages across rural Africa.

Evil men

On Saturday we hopped in an 11 person VW van and went 2 hours through
the Ghanaian country side to the old capital of Ghana, Cape Coast.
There we went to one of the largest and most important slave castles in
the Atlantic slave trade.
It was a sobering experience. Our guide started off the tour by taking
us to the women's quarters. We entered into the small chambers where 400
women were crammed in at one time. I could barely stand the smell for
3 minutes as we stood inside the place where they ate, slept and
relieved themselves. It must have been miserable! The governors
quarters were conveniently right above them with window and a trap door.
They would pick one they liked and rape them. If they became pregnant
they would send them elsewhere to have their child. The men had
similarly poor, dank living conditions. Those who did not cooperate
were put into a room with no lights and left there to die from
starvation.
Will all these atrocities and many more going on within the walls of
this evil place, they had a chapel in the middle of the courtyard. It
is unbelievable to me to see the hypocrisy these people practiced. The
castle was littered with signs saying how holy and just the leaders of
these castles were. These evil men wielding power pretended to be God
fearing, just men.

Different

Names

So we arrived in Ghana the other night after over a day of traveling.
As we walked off the tarmac into the Accra airport we notices a sign
for Ed Parker. It was almost the name of one of the guys in our group,
Ed PACKER...just a little different. After asking one that guy holding
the sign, and then another, we finally decided that it was close enough
and they took us throught the govenment official line for immigration.
It turns out that our friend Kweku (the engineer who runs the shop we
will be ago), has connections at the airport here and has like 5
airport employees helping us out, not including the other 10 guys
outside there to help us.
Before getting there we learned how people recieve names in Ghana, its
a little different; they have a name for each day of the week on which
you are born. I looked it up and it turns out I am a Friday baby, and
therefore I am either yoofi, fifi or kofi. I like kofi. Wouldn't that
be easier when deciding what to name your baby?


Temperature

The first night we got in, it was 100 degrees at 10 pm. This was quite
a bit different from the 25 and snowing we left in Utah. Refreshing at
first, but today I noticed that my fabric watch band is only dry at
night when I take it off. I am sweating the entire day except when in
our air conditioned bedroom that hits you like a wall when
entering...the Ghanaians can't believe how cold we like it.


Cuting costs

I'll have to post a video of them cutting metal. They have power tools
here, but becuase tools cost more than labor and waste more metal, they
prefer to use a hacksaw and hammer and chisel. It took around 2 hours
for Bubba Isa to cut a 2'x 2' plate from a 1/4" thick sheet of steel.



10 apples up on top
One of the coolest things we've done yet was when we went out to machinist market to buy material for our merry go round. I wish I could upload pictures...but on this connection, I can't even upload