I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.

Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.

edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.

  • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’ve also been caught out by this in other places. I was in Hong Kong and went up to The Peak, which has a 3km path around the top. I thought one water bottle was enough for a flat walk in 35C humid summer heat. It wasn’t and ended up rationing water halfway through and chugging two whole bottles of water when I got back to where I could get water again.