In May 2011 Cycle Forum member Alec McCalden left to take up new work in Utrecht, in The Netherlands. You can read here an occasional series of posts about his experiences of living and working there. Frequent references to cycles will naturally come into the discussion.

The posts are written at the time and not corrected for misconceptions later. Gross errors might be tidied up, but that's all. It's likely that you'll see a shift of perception as the weeks go by.

A useful tip is that Google's Chrome web browser can be set to give a usable auto translation of any Dutch web pages linked from these posts.