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.
Can confirm. Went swimming in Ireland in the summer once, my friend who lived there gave me a wetsuit to wear. Some other locals wore them, others didnt.
I stayed dry and fully clothed while building a sandcastle and watched the locals go swimming in wetsuits. Can’t remember where, somewhere on the coast of Claire or Galway.
I was staying in Doolan, so it must have been Bishops quater beach. It was in 2004, so I could be wrong.
So are Irish conditions different from conditions over the sea in Wales, or…?
It’s not that cold. It’s the Gulf Stream, which flows south-north from a tropical origin so it’s warmer than the water on the US west coast, for example, which flows north-south from the Bering Sea on the Alaska Current.
The Gulf Stream is also why northwestern Europe is as temperate as it is while being at the same latitudes as southeastern Alaska and northern British Columbia which have heavily glaciated coastlines.
If the Norwegian fjotds were in Alaska, for example, they would be the mouths of giant glaciers, but they aren’t, again because of the warming influence of the Gulf Stream.
Not sure if that makes sense, but anyway.