Sunrise

Naturally we think of doing group activities in the evenings, after work, or over the weekend, when we’re free for the entire day. Some people take the opposite approach. They wake up early to go for a morning sunrise run or a croissant loop bike ride.

The concept is simple. Instead of waking up for work, you wake up early, and you do an hour of sport between 0700-0800. In so doing you get your bike ride or run, before your day of work. It then includes a café, a croissant, possibly breakfast, and then to work we go.

I set the alarm for 05:30 this morning and when it went off I was tempted to ignore it and sleep more. I had the self-discipline to get up anyway, shower, and then dress for a bike ride. When I was ready to go the watch told me “sunrise in 10 minutes” and I set off then.

On the way to Nyon I was beeped by a car for not using the cycle lane. There was no traffic, and if I had used the cycle lane then either I would have been forced to stop as the car passed me, due to losing my priority. That’s why I stuck to road. I was at over 30 kilometres per hour in a town, and since there was no traffic the car had no reason to beep me.

There is a chance that I have had the same Swisscom contract since 2003 or 2007 non-stop. In that time I have been very happy with network coverage. What I am less happy with is the price. At seventy or more francs for unlimited data it becomes very expensive on a yearly basis. Recently I noticed that I could get “unlimited data” for nineteen francs per month within Switzerland so I took a subscription in parallel to run some tests.

There are many things I have done in the past but having a barbeque at five am whilst the birds are tweeting and the sun is rising is not within my normal realm of experiences. It was nice, felt more like the end of a festival night than anything else. The party took place at a friend’s place along the Metropolitan line. We arrived at about 7 pm and that moment everything about the party was normal, all the usual features, barbeques, people, drinks and more. Not that many people ate much at the beginning of the night, preferring to socialise instead. At the end of the night when most people were responsibly going to bed we decided to have a barbeque. It was a mission at first. We had to find out how to open the garden door. It had been locked therefore we could not go out through one door and had to get another one. After this, we had to struggle to find the fire lighting blocks. Finally, we lit the blocks and now it was time to wait for the fire to be warm enough. By this point, the birds were tweeting more and more excitedly as the sun was rising. As the blue of the sky started to appear our fire was warm enough for the steaks. It took a little time to cook with improvised tools. The food was finally ready and those steaks were good. It doesn’t end there A popular phrase was “there’s plenty of meat left in the fridge”, resulting in some turkey being fetched and cooked. The pieces were thicker so aluminium helped speed up the cooking process Once we had eaten this it was time for bed for my friends whilst I decided to go home on the tube. There was just one problem, the tube station was closed and there was no indication of when it’d open. You can imagine my joy at the thought of waiting for them to open. It didn’t matter though, I walked back. It was actually a nice walk. No one in the streets except the occasional post worker. The air was nice, felt like a proper summer morning. Finally, I was home, having no special need to go to sleep quite yet I stayed up for a little longer. By around 8 am I was asleep. It had been an interesting night.