Yesterday I joined the monthly Vienna Critical Mass Bike Ride once again. At first it was so great that I couldn't remember why I hadn't been there since the first one I joined in November. Hundreds of cyclists populated the streets that reverberate with the noise of a thousand engines at all other times.

But the longer it took, the more I did remember why for months I hadn't felt the urge to be a part of Critical Mass again. Some of the reasons are people placing empty beer cans on the hoods of patiently waiting cars and  people blocking oncoming and otherwise uninvolved traffic for no other reason than spite. Also, later the same night I witnessed the weekly inline skate event. What I liked most about the hundreds of inline skaters was the sound: none. Once you take away the cars and replace them by wheels powered by humans, the sound of the city turns into a gentle wzzzzz. Not with Critical Mass though: Critical Mass needs boom bikes, blasting obnoxious music all over the place. After all, people could think cyclists aren't happy people when there's no noise involved.

Anyway, most of the time it was still great and I wouldn't want to have missed the opportunity to cycle along the Gürtel, which is a kind of Autobahn encircling centre Vienna.

I took some pictures and managed to find a spot in the back room but the bloody gallery is broken, prepared them fucking manually for the backroom and I also shot two short clips (left one static, capturing front to back, on the right overtaking the pack from back to front).

They're no great example of suspense in contemporary Viennese film, (in other words: pretty boring to watch), but the sheer mass still is impressive.