Last ride of the year today

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In North America there is a biker culture and like any subculture there is slang that with which people outside the culture are usually not familiar. Not just US because I have a relative in Napanee who participates in that culture and I've seen a photo she took inside a biker bar that looked just like you would expect in the US. However owning a bike doesn't automatically make one part of the subculture. If goldfish wasn't bothered by the fact that the travel ban prevented him from visiting Sturgis ND last year then he's probably not part of the subculture.

I can remember traveling by road from Vienna to Budapest in the early 70s and noticing that most privately owned passenger vehicles were motorcycles, in particular with sidecars for families with children. Motorcycles are far more mainstream in Europe than in NA and motorcycle racing is a major spectator sport there although I suspect few in NA know much about it.

Only owned a bike for a couple years, never been to Sturgis. Even people I know that have been aren’t really what I would call “bikers,” here. Mind you, Here where I live, true motorcycle enthusiasts are not the type of people we refer to as “bikers.” Here, the word biker pretty much = Hell’s Angel or HA outlaw motorcycle gang affiliate involved in the drug trade & other organized crime. 6 of us went for a ride in Vancouver and some pedestrian at a stop light jokingly asked if we were a gang.

Families on motorcycles = nope. Illegal to have kids on a bike that can’t reach the passenger foot pegs, so no small kids. Side cars are extremely rare - I’ve probably seen 2 on the ride in my entire life. Motorcycle racing is a rather obscure sport here. Never heard of anyone going to watch as a spectator. Some of our riding school instructors race, so we know it’s a thing that exists, but not sure how far they have to travel to a race course. A friend spent years woods racing dirt bikes for Yamaha - so that exists here; but like his hang glider racing, not really a spectator sport. But over all motorcycle racing here is a pretty tiny thing w/ the exception of idiots who like to get up to race speeds on the highways and then make the news for the whole lot of them getting pulled over and having their bikes impounded. Others, like my friend, get away with doing 292kmh on the Sea to Sky highway.

This is very intriguing. You're saying that in the early 70s, long before the USSR showed signs of ever collapsing, you traveled into an Iron Curtain country? Wow. Was it scary at all, or were you worried about not being able to leave?

Thank you very much for posting the motorbike rally , happy New Years .

2 bike rally? Lol

Often when we go for rides there’s 6 or 7 of us. More family and friends plan on taking riding lessons and buying bikes over the next year or so as well. Then there’s the ~dozen or so from the unofficial motorcycle club at my older brothers work - they’re planning a 5 day motorcycle trip next summer I’m The Sunshine Coast that involves taking a $350 20 hour ferry ride. We’re gonna go.

Some fam attended the annual Toy Run motorcycle rally to raise donated toys for kids at Christmas in 2019, but it was cancelled in 2020 due to covid. I think that single day rally is probably the biggest one here. Hundreds of bikes riding along a set route bringing toy donations of their own and picking up toys from donation drop off sites & then delivering them all to one final spot for distribution to underprivileged kids. Probably a lot of HA types there, but also normal riders. Bikers (of the organized crime variety) are very well known for their generosity to kids at Christmas.

Without intending to sugar coat the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, the fact is that the Cold War was indeed a war and much of what we in America "learned" about the "other side" was propaganda intended to make us feel as threatened as possible. It might help if I were to explain that my first trip to Budapest was as part of a group from an US college that was spending a semester in Vienna. Austria was officially neutral in the Cold War and they had no illusions about the shortcomings of Marxism-Leninism but also weren't afraid to travel to Warsaw Pact countries. Tour buses also regularly came to Vienna from Hungary.

The 2nd time I was in Budapest, I went back to Vienna after having spent a semester in France, so I decided to tack on a side trip to Budapest. The 3rd time was the following summer when I was travelling around Europe with my first GF and went there because I wanted to show her stuff I'd personally experienced. On the last 2 occasions, both times I rented a private room through an agency that was in the train station which was a normal way for tourists from both East and West to stay in Budapest. This sort of arrangement was also common in Western Europe. Of course it brought you in direct contact with "ordinary" Hungarians. At that time, knowledge of German was widespread in Budapest so I was able to have quite a few detailed conversations with people I met there.

Not all Warsaw Pact countries were equally oppressive. East Germany and Czechoslovakia seemed to be the most oppressive, the latter probably more so because the Prague Spring had happened quite recently.

What were you studying? The ways of nomadic peoples? Or did you just keep getting kicked out of schools and had to skip the country before your record caught up to you?

I was studying modern languages, a foolish choice in retrospect, but at least I managed (with some dumb luck) to eventually get a career in programming in which I am still engaged. So if you want me to identify overseas trips in connection with visits to Budapest, the first (as I stated previously) was a weekend excursion my college group took when I spent a semester in Vienna, the second was at the conclusion of a semester in France, and the 3rd was the following summer with my first girlfriend after she had completed a semester in Germany. This was nearly 50 years ago when US college tuition fees weren't anything like they are nowadays.

Aaah. I suppose it makes sense that one would travel around a bit to immerse themselves in different languages while studying them.

Where I live, I would just have to wander around campus to find people speaking a dozen different languages. :p

And yeah, Canadian tuitions have gone up like crazy, too. I haven’t yet looked into the closest university’s fees for pet time courses yet, but speaking with a part time student at The most prestigious school here, she paid $600 in annual registration fees, then $600 tuition for one first level chemistry or biology class + books ($200?) sooo $1400 to get started taking one single part time class. If someone took 2 classes/year, that’s $2200. Obviously a bit cheaper by taking more classes & dividing the registration fee over more classes, but still: It’s very expensive. Have yet to crunch the numbers on part time vs full time but it should be cheaper per credit for a full course load I Think - it’s just that then you lose your ability to work full time.

But whatever, one of these days This Year I’ll register somewhere and take At Least One part time class. Maybe even for free online. And eventually I’ll make the shift to full time school. And I’m my dreams it’ll be at the best school here and also in my dreams I’ll strike a deal with the facilities department to ply my trade on campus in between classes/evenings in order to maintain an income that can afford to pay for tuition & books. Not impossible, truly, because there are Not a lot of people that can do what I can do now and Most buildings & property managers are always on the lookout for someone like me. What a life that would be? Almost never leave campus.. just throw a couple trowels in my saddle bags and ride across campus to patch a wall & pay for another text book.

Well if you can support yourself comfortably as a tradesman then it's debatable whether you have any real need for University, which to my mind is overrated unless you are determined to become a lawyer or physician etc. Just don't run yourself into debt in the process. Many people your age, at least in the US, are in serious debt and you are fortunate not to be. Given the uncertainty of the next decade you probably want stay in your financial comfort zone.

BTW there are plenty of folks doing what I do for a living without degrees, although in my case I need one because I'm on a Government contract (civilian agency).

Gee, I wonder if such tactics are still being employed today in other matters...

Anyway, I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't saying "How could you go over into that hellhole?" I was asking if you, as an American, had any fears of being detained or suspected of espionage. Had you been an Austrian border-hopping into Hungary, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But as an America, were there any fears, or was life the same as on the other side of the border?

3 of us went for the first ride of the year this afternoon. Light rain, oh well. Hopefully dry weather soon. (Yeah right lol)

I suppose it would help if I could find a list of Western tourists detained while innocently travelling in the Eastern Bloc, but not having that info, nevertheless I am not aware of any significant occurrence of that sort of thing. I believe it did happen. I don't know if it ever happened in Hungary. I can recall reading about people getting into trouble in the GDR. The usual scenario was they took photographs of things that were deemed critical to security, in particular modes of public transportation. Although I think the worst that might have happened would be that they would remove the film from your camera. I think I read about people getting into trouble by getting into political discussions that were overheard by the wrong people.

Of course if you did something deliberate you'd get into trouble.

You can do your own research. You'll probably come up with a few horror stories but it was a long time ago and I am not a historian.

^^Thanks for the reply.

I did wonder if you were at least apprehensive on your first visit to Hungary, but it sounds like you weren't the slightest bit concerned at it was smooth sailing. Glad it all went well.