15 Things I Loved about Living & Bicycling in Groningen (the Netherlands) +25 Pictures

I meant to complete this “things I loved about living & bicycling in ________” series before National Bike Month ended, but it didn’t happen and, anyway, bike month should be every month! Here’s the second-to-last post of the series….

I lived in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands for 5 months in 2007. With a bike commute rate of about 50-60% and about 2/3 of inhabitants, in total, using the bike from time to time, Groningen is a top-notch bicycle city. It has been named Bicycle City of the World on more than one occasion and the following are probably the main reasons why.

By Zach | June 5, 2011 | City Planning, Transportation | 13 Comments |
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Dark Chocolate Health Benefits

I love dark chocolate, and I’ve heard it’s good for you (or, at least, not bad for you) but I had never really looked into how much nutrition, what kind of nutrition, or what kind of other health benefits it offered. (I just assumed people were telling me the truth and didn’t concern myself too much with the matter — I eat it when I feel like it.) However, today, I have decided to look into the matter (yes, to write this post). After grabbing a little dark chocolate my partner brought me from the Czech Republic recently and sitting down to research the matter, I have to say that what I’ve found is pretty impressive…

By Zach | June 2, 2011 | Health | 4 Comments |
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7 Things I Loved about Living & Bicycling in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, & Redwood City, CA

Following up on my posts about what I loved about living and bicycling in Sarasota, FL and Chapel Hill-Carrboro, NC, here are 7 things I loved about living and bicycling in Northern California. In the middle of graduate school, I lived in Sunnyvale for a summer, worked in Redwood City, and did most of my grocery shopping in Palo Alto. So, despite being 3 different places, they were sort of one place to me and I’m combining them all for this.

By Zach | May 31, 2011 | City Planning, Transportation | 2 Comments |
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Factory Farm Investigations on New Interactive Map

It must be the week for maps. I just recently announced that Food & Water Watch won an Interactive Media Award (IMA) for its interactive factory farming map. Now, news is there’s another great interactive factory farming map just out from Animal Visuals, an excellent site with “visual resources for animals” (I’ve shared some of their stuff when writing about livestock production in the U.S. before).

By Zach | May 30, 2011 | Farming, Vegetarian and Vegan | No Comments |
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10 Things I Loved about Living & Bicycling in Sarasota, Florida

To wrap up National Bike Month, I’m doing a little series on what I loved about living and bicycling in the various places I’ve lived and bicycled. (But don’t worry, even after this month, I’ll do plenty more writing about bicycling as well.)

To start with, I’ll start with the first city I lived in, the city where I started bicycling as a main mode of transport and gave up my car. Living in Sarasota, Florida from birth until the age of 22 or so, I know that city better than any other.

By Zach | May 27, 2011 | City Planning, Transportation | 3 Comments |
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Factory Farming Map Wins Interactive Media Award (Acceptance Speech Cut Off)

I wrote about a pretty awesome (though, disturbing) interactive factory farming map created by Food & Water Watch and New Signature back in December. The map “illustrates the geographic shift in where and how food is raised in the U.S. and allows anyone to quickly search for the highest concentration of animals by region, state and county.” A non-interactive version of it is above.

By Zach | May 24, 2011 | Farming, Food & Water, Health | No Comments |
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Berlin — Bike Paradise

I recently took a short little vacation to Berlin (just about 5-7 hours away by train from where I live). While I had noticed when I visited the first time (2 years ago) that it was a tremendous bike city and put it at #7 in my bike city photo tours series, I didn’t bike around the city on that visit. Additionally, it was rather cold and rainy, so biking wasn’t in full bloom there.

This time around, we (my partner Marika and friend Salah) were set on biking, a bit at least. The weather was nice and our friend got us some bikes. We ended up going on a bike ride that lasted 5 hours or so on our first full day there.

By Zach | May 19, 2011 | City Planning, Transportation | 5 Comments |
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