Trouble

Can we transcend and breathe the serenity we are surrounded with?

He can.

A Beautiful Photograph

Sometimes, you aim the camera, get your lines straight, make sure the subject is still in the shot and press the shutter (if I can still call it that on a digital camera).

With those movements, an image is formed. Simply. But sometimes, and with a strike of luck, something else happens and a beautiful image is formed.

This photograph of Sandra, riding her bike in California, is one of those. The colours, the shapes, the depth... I could go on looking for more reasons to call this a beautiful photograph. But, at the end of the day, it is a beautiful image because I like it and can't stop looking at it.

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Bench at the train station

The second best thing to riding a bike to work is catching a train to work.

I can only do it a couple of times in my working week because of the different start and finishing times. In addition, I am not at walking distance to the station so when I can, I need to drive there, park my car and do the second half of the commute in the train, a whole 12 min.

There is something about travelling on trains, something that I could never do because of where I lived and, being honest here, for not ever thinking about alternative types of transport when choosing a place to live and work.

I came from a country where train-surfing was invented, from a city where the trains arrived at the Central Station overloaded with commuters of all kinds. Again, that wasn’t part of my life. The only time I witnessed the diversity of life found in major stations was during seldom journeys to the city centre or when I watched a movie on the TV.

There were overseas travels later in life. In any of the cases, they fascinated me. They made me want to do more of it one day.

I have a chance to get a taste of it, now. It makes me happy.

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A Familiar Image

With the acquisition of my first digital camera came the desire to take photographs. Good photographs.

Taking good photographs isn't a very easy thing to do. It usually involves creativity, a good subject, technical and equipment knowledge and a bit of luck. It also requires experimentation. That's what lots of my images are going to be. Not saying that I have found or reached any of the factors I described, I chose to post this photograph because the subject is actual but also has a lot to do with my cultural past.



Although, it is not a picture of what was served to me for breakfast, black coffee and buttered bread was a true morning meal enjoyed by a huge proportion of the Brazilian population. I have vivid images of myself, riding my bike around the block and observing the small popular bars, botequins found on almost every corner of Rio's suburbs, serving the popular and inexpensive morning meal.

Workers, bosses and passbyers stopped and gathered, enjoying their morning meal while discussing the previous night football match and else. I remember the smells. There was the smell of coffee, the smell of hot bread rolls and the smell of the people. Sometimes, the smell of an alcoholic drink, cachaca, which was very popular among the workers at the time.

I believe those sights and smells were spread around the whole country. Today, odd as it might sound, I find myself having just that for my morning meal. And I love it! It is simple, tasty and not too high in calories. On the photographs, the bread was made in a bread maker by my partner and has all these healthy ingredients and flavours. Delicious!

The first post

It is a new year. It is also the first anniversary of AMRcycling, the blog about training and racing. So it is time for a kind of celebration.
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For the celebration, and due to the great experience that AMRcycling has been, I chose to start Bicycle Diaries by AMR. True that there are other bicycle diaries around and true that there is a movie (which I happened to like a lot) with such a title but it doesn't bother me. It doesn't because I want this blog to evolve into something a little different.

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The content of Bicycle Diaries by AMR is a little indefinite but I want it to be a bit diverse... or perhaps very diverse. I know it is not going to be a daily account of my or everybody else's time on the bicycle, training or racing. It is more likely to be a picture of what is around us, sometimes even on a bicycle.

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To begin, I have a series of digital images taken yesterday. Fresh out of the computer, they don't have titles, I am happy to identify the series as The Drive Train Series.

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#157

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