Night

Yesterday I went for an evening bike ride in Geneva and I chose to take the train home, rather than cycle. In the process I saw that trains are not that convenient later at night. The reason for this is that they’re smaller, so the space for bikes is restricted.

A person boarded before me so he was able to put his bike down and go and sit. I was after him so I was stuck standing with my bike. I held the rear brake and used the bike as a seat. I was careful not to fall over, and to keep the passage free for people boarding and getting off.

Every year the Moléson tourism board and related teams provide people with the oppotunity to do the Face, and the Pillar by night. I have wanted to experience this multiple times in the past but because either of work, or weather, I had to cancel the plan to experience this.

The idea is simple. Sunset is at 20:25. People start climbing the VF from 1900 onwards with the option of doing the “easy” Pillar or the hard “Face”. As I did The Face a few weeks ago in daylight I did The Pillar instead. My decision was based on two things. The first is that I had organised to go with a group, and I felt a sense of responsibility to help those with less experience should they require it.

If you’re wondering why one of the tags in my post is “Day 388” it’s because I shifted from WordPress to ClassicPress once again. In so doing I lost access to Akismet and Jetpack. By losing Akismet I lose comment spam filtering. I also lost access to the Jetpack app so I lost access to my streak info. That’s why I included it as a task.

Astronomy Wallpaper

If, like me, you’re using the Astronomy Wallpaper on your mobile phones you will have noticed that the shadow over the Northern hemisphere has shifted. It has gone from being a south to North shadow to an East to West shadow from the top of Europe. You can see how parts of Norway, Sweden England and Finland are now in the dark for longer and longer parts of the day. It’s rational that we would see it, but it’s interesting that we can see an illustration of how seasons change the pattern of daylight on earth.

Yesterday i drove through the rain for two hours at night and it was so demanding that i stopped the audiobook to focus on driving. It was harder to see the lines, and the rain was heavy enough to impact visibility.

I made it but i would think twice about driving through such rain at night on a 12hr drive for the last two hours.

I expect that going to do the Moléson Via Ferrata by night will be like scuba diving in the lake. I expect that on the Moléson night I will see the cliff face in front of me and that if I turn around I will see darkness around me. I suspect I will be able to see certain stars and city lights in nearby towns. I am curious to see how bottomless the void behind me will feel. I also expect a fun ambiance. You need to sign up to participate and an e-mail is enough. They want your name and address, to know whether you have your own equipment or whether you need to rent and whether you have already tried via ferrata before. Now that I signed up I am looking forward to the new sensation. This is a via ferrata I have done when it was cloudy, when it was about to rain, with maintenance crew and with friends. I know it well. I look forward to experiencing it in yet another way.

The games are starting at 10am Tokyo time but 3am Geneva time and it’s amusing getting to work. Yesterday was really tiring as I’d been woken by workers at 7am. So far we’ve seen about 40 matches and Italy’s defeat was a shame. We only have one match at a time but four of them in total so our day is 14hrs long. The teams today are: germany vs nigeria, US vs australia, France vs. Angola and Greece Vs. China.