When you're head of Public Diplomacy, Culture and Communication for the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC, it certainly doesn't hurt to ride in style around the city.
And on a smashingly elegant Pedersen bicycle. A design by Michael Pedersen dating from 1893 and revived by the designer Jesper Sølling in the 1970's.
Now THAT is my kind of Ambassador.
ReplyDeleteWe're happy to have him in town (& the bicycle, too:)
ReplyDeleteToo bad he wasn't to be seen when I was living in the DC area in 2003-2005. I had my own triangle bike, a folding Strida 3, which turned heads everywhere I went. Not being in the middle of a bike-centred culture though, I had many people asking me if it was electric-powered -- as if that is what it would make it a legitimate means of transport. (To be fair, though, there were, at that time, a fairish number of cyclists to be seen on the streets, though not nearly as many as in Montreal, which looked like Amsterdam by comparison when I came back for a visit. Still, cyclists were nearly either exclusively middle class white men decked out in full "kit" or low income black men. Very very few women at all: the only one I remember at all was a black American woman in hijab, obviously a free thinker making her own choices in life in more than one way.
ReplyDeleteAh, but does the Ambassador have one with a little Danish flag on the front?
ReplyDeleteactually, he had a danish flag on the back for the event we were at, but we took it off as it was a bit corny. :-)
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be rather a tragic story attached to this extraordinary bike. Solling's website is now a note in 3 languages saying that his designs have been stolen by a German company, which is now distributing "Pedersen" bikes from Oldenburg.
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