Finally got my steel horse back from the shop. Yep, that legendary blue Merida ;-). I skipped the last season — no time for rides — but this year I’ve got big plans: so many beautiful places to visit and many kilometers to cover.

A word of advice for everyone in the saddle: don’t put off maintenance. Otherwise, you’ll end up replacing not just the chain, but the cassette and chainrings too — speaking from experience.

I came across an interesting bike in the night city. It feels like I captured a little scene—something is clearly happening here. Maybe the stenciled figure left their bike by the pole and went off to a late-night store or a date. Or maybe we’re actually witnessing the aftermath of an accident? If you pay close attention to the world around you, you’ll start to notice all sorts of curious things. It’s useful to see the invisible.

Walked at sunset with the excellent lens Mir-1V.

It’s become a tradition: spring for me comes with a French soundtrack.
Today it’s Juliette Armanet and her À la folie.

A beautiful song — a great melody, beautifully sung, incredibly well put together!

Notice how Juliette emphasizes the endings of words. She marks them like punctuation at the end of sentences. It adds clarity, transparency, and creates the right rhythm for this song: a heartbeat, a dance, passion.

What’s interesting is this: the song is about losing control, yet the delivery is meticulous. It sounds like an attempt to hold oneself together through the music, to stay afloat. Like a spell. Like a ritual chant:

Fête… défaite… tête-à-tête…
Danse… cadence… chance…

Without those crisp endings, everything would fall apart — the words would blur together, losing their shape like hazy memories.

And the words themselves form striking contrasts:

• fête / défaite — celebration and defeat
• tête-à-tête — intimacy, closeness, but also enclosure
• danse / cadence / chance — everything spins and moves, like life or fate

French speech usually flows — soft transitions, fluid connections, as if everything melts into everything else. But here, it’s different: the endings cut through. The rhythm becomes broken, almost sharp — like breath caught at an emotional peak.

The stress on endings feels like a fixation of tension, like a point of no return.

A great example of how form serves content. In a song about mad love, where everything might fall apart at any moment, these precise endings bring ritual order.

Highly recommended listening!

At the end of my walk on Yakub Kolas Square, I met a hedgehog. For some reason, it made me so happy! I can’t even put it into words.

He was strolling along the sidewalk. I walked around him so he wouldn’t get scared and run into the road. I stomped my foot — he curled into a ball, breathing, trembling. Then he peeked out and looked around. Even posed a little while I took some photos.

The city falls asleep. I hear the cries of birds.