There's more to living green than being serious, yah! Yesterday my friend and colleague Josef Bray-Ali held a party for the opening of his Flying.... There's more to living green than being serious, yah!

Yesterday my friend and colleague Josef Bray-Ali held a party for the opening of his Flying Pigeon LA bicycle shop. A longtime sustainability advocate and cyclist (who carts his baby around in a Dutch bakfiets cargo bike), Josef has decided to go into business with his brother selling the terminally unglamourous Chinese Flying Pigeon commute-and-shopping bike--a heavy but sturdy machine that comes equipped with basket, rack, chaincase and fenders (to protect your clothes), and generator lighting, for less than three hundred bucks. A workaday fuel-free replacement for your workaday but generally beyond-excessive automobile.

But the party needed beer, and Josef was a bit short on time. The nearest locally-brewed (or close to it) beer was in Pasadena, a couple of hours on the bakfiets (which could handle the load easily), so Josef took--not a car, not even an electric car, but the next-cleanest mode of mechanized transport after the bicycle: the Metro Gold Line train! One block to the local station, a quick ride to Pasadena, and one block to the purveyor of spiritous liquors. And voilà:



A good time was had by all. You can see pictures of the opening on our sister publication Bicycle Fixation's blog: Flying Pigeons Land in Los Angeles.