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.
6 comments:
Now THAT is my kind of Ambassador.
We're happy to have him in town (& the bicycle, too:)
Too 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.
Ah, but does the Ambassador have one with a little Danish flag on the front?
actually, 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. :-)
There 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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