I am by no means Japanese, but if I would be, or indeed even speak the language, these two kanji is how I would write my name; Ran, meaning approximately "chaos" and Zen meaning, well, "zen". It is my ambition to use this blog as a forum for highly irregular anecdotal rambling on topics on everything from travel, music and philosophy to bioinformatics.
Bergen has Europe's most polluted air, due to horrible traffic. So what does the city ("Bergen kommune") do? Cuts up locks and removes people's bikes! Because parking them outside is illegal. So this morning mine and all the street's bikes were gone, some previously decorated with stickers that I had noticed ("varsel om fjerning" / "notice of removal") saying approximately "Illegal parking. Not frequently used, thus junk". Not on mine though. It had been standing exactly 2 days. It's hard to use your bike every day in the icy winter streets, so I don't see how this makes them junk in either case. I think I will start stealing cars from the people working for the kommune if nobody seems to be using them at the time. Maybe leave a notice a day before on some car nearby.
