Others Barefoot in Public?

this is the first time I get to know some other barefooter. i was at a friends'pad waiting for some guy and when he came in, for a short while barefooters were the majority there . the dude told me he spends the whole summer barefoot, and in fact he was around in town unshod. the very first time i can relate to someone else who appreciates the contact with earth, enjoys it daily and talks about that too. i mean face to face. it is to be said that his (main) work favors barefooting a lot being a worker in a seaside resort . «after a couple of months spent barefoot you cannot imagine how tough my feet can grow!» ...
two days ago i spotted a young lady crossing barefoot the centre of town on a bycycle, another really rare sighting . maybe people is slowly getting more tolerant and relaxed about bare feet in public . or maybe it is recession

 

As I was driving to the car wash earlier this afternoon, I spotted a barefoot young guy who appeared to be in his 20s talking on his cell phone. The funny thing was, he was in front of a shoe store! That made me wonder if he was going to buy himself a pair of shoes.

 

A few items worth noting,...

Last week my wife and I went for a walk. As we wandered through an adjacent neighborhood, two guys came out simultaneously to place their trash by the curb for pickup. Both were barefoot. Noticing each other, they approached and started talking on the sidewalk. Not that big a deal, but I just don't see that many guys wandering around barefoot. It made me wonder if their practice extends further than the curb, LOL!

I've seen the same kid out barefoot a couple of times. He lives a couple of streets over, is probably about 14, but I saw him one day walking barefoot down the street with a lacrosse stick and ball just casually tossing it around. Last night I saw him barefoot taking his dog for a walk. He's seems pretty casual about it, so I think he's a "barefooter" in the making!

Finally, in the past I've mentioned a woman who lives a few doors down from us. I'm guessing she's in her 60's and retired. When it's warm, she's always barefoot whenever I see her. Usually she's walking her dog, but sometimes she's just working in the yard. I'll have to chat with her when the opportunity presents itself. At her age, she was probably a barefoot hippie chick in the 60's!

 

There was a lady working completely barefoot behind the counter at a cafe I visited today. Quite a suprise, Ive never seen that before.

 

I saw a lady probably in her 50-60's walking into the library barefoot today. She'd probably been barefoot a while because her soles were as dirty as mine. Strange thing is the other day a security personnel in the library told me that I had to wear shoes into the library because it's a health code issue! Oh well, it was nice to see a fellow hippy barefooter.

Cheers!

 

i got kicked out of a Dollar General for being Barefoot.

 

Its been pretty warm in the UK this week, so its about time you found someone barefoot even behind a counter. There should be more out there.

 

well I finally got to "evangelize" a casual BF'er .
days ago i met this guy who was barefoot as well. we had some talk about our habits, and today i've been told by a common friend that my example persuaded him to discard shoes totally for this summer and go for 24/7 barefooting... :groupwave: viral barefooting ? new fashion on the rise ??? this summer I keep spotting shoeless people where i don't expect to find.

 

im most of the time barefoot while at home, work, walking the dog, running, or playing sports... but when i'm in the city i wear my toe shoes, the vibram ones,...

i was in cambridge last week chatting with some dude while wearing my toe shoes and a girl told me that i should quit being a pussy and go barefoot. she said my soles would get tough in no time. i told her i don't go barefoot in the city because of broken glass and the subway being nasty, but in my hometown i'm almost always barefoot. the funny part was that she was wearing flip flops.

people are funny

 

Okay, this doesn't count as barefoot in public, but was cool nonetheless. A friend invited a couple of us over yesterday afternoon. We sat outside talking for a while and then went inside. I was immediately struck by three sets of bare feet sticking up in the air! My friend's wife, daughter, and a friend, were all watching a movie, stretched across couches, and feet propped up. Realizing bare feet were the standard in his home, I wasted no time kicking off my flip flops. Later, his wife went out to see off a friend, so she put on her flip flops to walk across the gravel drive, but the minute she came in, they were off and she was barefoot again. Somebody's getting the point!

 

Last Saturday i saw two teens (a boy & a girl) walking bf over the Humber bridge, but since they were carrying their shoes, it doesn't really count.
But it does show they find barefooting acceptable...

 

I hate shoes, they block your senses.

 

Flip-flops killed the barefoot walkers...

...similar to video killing the radio star. Ironically, the video to that song was the first ever shown on MTV. Prophetic in a way, wasn't it? With flip-flops and other types of thin-soled fashionable summer footwear (currently amplified by boho and hippie fashion making yet another return – even Karl Lagerfeld had models walking barefoot in flowing hippie chic robes in St. Tropez) bare feet have become a rarity to spot in my local urban environment.

The last two days' counter of other barefoot people in public shows the number two so far – number one being a homeless punk woman asking for change, sitting on her blanket in the ped zone, cross-legged, her dog dozing next to her. Number two was a young boy I spotted today walking the suburbian pavement next to his shod grandmother, while I was sitting in the tram. Since I saw him from behind, his black bare soles told me, that he had been walking barefoot for a while, too. Other than that, even those people whom I normally would sort into the target group for barefooting – at least by their dressing the boho/hippie part – are wearing either the foam-rubber sole sweat sponges known as flip-flops, or thin leather sandals.

Even though there is plenty of barefoot-positive publicity in health magazines, blogs, this very forum, sports-related articles, etc., it seems that people still don't seem to get it. I guess it needs just more role models to promote the „coolness“ of walking barefoot and swimming against the mainstream, I guess. Plus, even those who might want to walk barefoot are currently taken aback by hot summer temperatures and the sun heating up the pavement to levels unbearable for tenderfoot, untrained non-barefooters.

Wiggling bare toes, spreading my own kind of coolness (by wearing a tie-dye skirt when barefooting the town center today... something to really boggle the mainstream's collective mind),

~*Ganesha*~

 

very well said. i get sensitive deprivation when i'm shod. people thinks i'm kidding when i say i need to feel on what surface i'm on.

 

Today its been raining all day between sorta wet and major downpours and instant flooding. It's also 80 degrees. I have been back and forth across town every now and then for about the last 3 hours doing errands on and off. There are 3 (i dunno i think 16 year old boys) who have been apparently going back and forth from hangouts in town and to each others houses i'm guessing (all different parts of town). Anyhow, they are drenched, smiling, and have been shirtless and barefoot (carrying no shoes or for that matter shirts) since the rain started and they seem to be the only comfortable creatures other than the ducks swimming in the streets. Good for them, they seem happy...the kids, tho the ducks seem to be smiling as well. They may be the only smart humans out today. It may take a deluge but barefooting may be making a comeback here.

 

Since catching a summer cold (I still think that jerk, who coughed right at the back of my neck in the checkout queue - three times, too... as if to make sure! - deserves to lie in bed with fever and suffer!), I haven't been outside much, just to do some necessary shopping yesterday and buy some drinks at the gas station opposite my apartment house. At least the symptoms of that darn cold have subsided to a bearable level.

The barefoot encounter was just when going to that gas station, as a flip-flop wearing mother and her two young daughters came out of the little shop, the younger daughter holding her flip-flops in her hands, walking barefoot. She was just starting a sentence, and suddenly stopped talking, froze on beholding my bare feet, staring at them (well, the two colored toe nails and two toe rings on each foot must have been something new for her to see on a grown-up man's bare feet - just as a grown-up man walking barefoot, too) and then giving me a wide-eyed look of wonder. I grinned at her, passed them and then went inside to get some cold soda stuff and cigarettes.

Wiggling bare toes, sniffling a little from that darn summer cold,

~*Ganesha*~

 

Yes, indeed, perhaps it is people like that guy in the YouTube video I got pointed to today via the SBL mailing list, that make it harder to see other barefooters around... a prime example of spreading anti-barefoot sentiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YUI2JEkRg"]YouTube- Disturbing Actions of A Barefoot Man

Wiggling bare toes, wishing that that guy's face were only an inch away from them,

~*Ganesha*~

 

Wow, that guy's disturbing. Forget about our love of life without shoes. This guy really has a phobia not only about feet, but about living and working in whatever town he's in. Blood and gore on the sidewalk? People peeing on the sidewalk? Maybe he should build a bunker, stock it with several years' of food, and hide out from the invading evil forces. What's with the foot fetish comment at the end? Quick, get this guy some meds - STAT!!

 

I havn't really seen anyone barefoot this year cept my wife's lil brother's buddy in the garden the last few days

 

Enjoy it while it lasts. I read somewhere that as you get older there's a chemical change that takes place in the body that causes toenails to get thicker, and in men it increases the growth of nose and ear hair. I don't know about the ear and nose thing, but I'm 50 and I can tell you that feet do get gnarly. maybe it's just the 500 billion miles they have on them.

Omar