>>May as well get the tote bags. I think I can still handle 10kg on each side of the handlebars :).
>
>What are you doing pressing the pedestrian light button if you are on a bike? You cross the intersection with the vehicles on the traffic light, not with pedestrians...

Not here... there are too many private armored vehicles, they also tend to think I'm not moving, just like at home - these guys don't realize that if they've passed a bicycle ten seconds before the lights, if it takes them two seconds to the line, the bike will get there in ten more - but it will. In those ten seconds they have completely forgotten there was a bike and will take a sharp right turn, scratching the curb with their rear tire. Here, the streets which have that sort of traffic light are usually the streets where they drive 35 or 45 mph. I just don't trust them to notice me on time at that speed, specially if they see me against any nonhomogenous (i.e. not grass, not bare concrete) background - parked cars, hedge, etc. In the streets where it's 25mph, fine.

Anyway, nobody else is using these sidewalks :).

>Oh yeah, we 'quit smoking' here, not 'lost smoking.' :o) Or do you feel like you lost something in the process? :o)

"Lost" as in "mislaid". I may find it again, though I'm not really looking for.

Actually, it was lost some time before I stopped. It didn't have the taste anymore, not even the Dutch stuff; tried Marlboro - which used to be great when it was made in Sarajevo - and the quality was there, the best gunpowder there is, three puffs and you're done. I don't know what it is, but practically none of it had the smell or the taste it once had. And there were no cigarettes, and we tried a few, which had that great American taste we remember from the Soviet duty-free shops. So, came to the source and it wasn't there. Appointed, disappointed, done. For now. If genuine Herzegovinian škija as fermented and cut in Zadar ever appears again, I may change my mind. That one doesn't stink - I know, a colleague of mine had to quit smoking (caught pneumonia, went back to work too early, died within two weeks), and as his sense of smell returned, said "everything stinks... except that stuff you're smoking, that's the only one that's still nice".

Though, it wasn't the smell or taste that made me stop, it just helped. It was the indirect assault on private property that did it. If I can't smoke freely in our own house, then I'll rather not smoke at all.