Break down!

In April I experienced my first gelle break-down. It was only a matter of time, and thankfully, many factors helped make it less painful.
1) Julia was with me
2) It was not raining (because it has not properly rained since October, maybe
3) nothing particularly horrible happened, other than a bad smell.

Here’s how it went: Julia and I arrive at the car park. There is a man wearing a t-shirt I will describe to you in a moment, not because the t-shirt relates in any way to the car breaking down, but because I found it particularly baffling. The shirt is pink and is being worn by a large, muscular man. The front of the shirt has a large silver Q below, in an italic script, “Which girl does Jesus like?” On the back of the shirt is a large silver A, that I initially mistook to stand for “adultery” before I noticed that it went along with the Q, and the words “This one” and beneath that “Jeremiah 31:3.” A clue! If only we had a Bible… So we texted John, who explained Jeremiah 31:3, but that still didn’t explain the shirt, so if you dear blog reader, are able to do so, or are able to refer me to the manufacturer of this shirt, I’d be much obliged.

Anyway.

So we sat in the car waiting for awhile and Julia bought some coffee concoction that’s a sort of spicy Nescafé. Spicy as in full of spices, not spicy as in a dash of cayenne pepper.

And then the car broke down. Well, before it broke down it took us two-thirds of the way to our village, so it could have been worse. First the car stopped outside a little village and the driver and some other men tinkered with stuff while I sat on a rock, but it turned out that the part they needed could not be found in this village but the next one, so we climbed back in and sped along. Sped along in a frightening, grab-the-seat-in-front-of-you sort of way. I thought maybe we were trying to outrun the problem and wished someone would tell the driver that if we hit a donkey or something that would only make the problem worse. Fortunately, we slowed down shortly after speeding up and realized the driver was hoping to coast into town. Success!

And then there was waiting and waiting and because there wasn’t anything to do besides wait, we waited.

And after they fixed the car, we returned to village and that was that. Pretty mundane, really. But I was not in the mood for an exciting adventure, so it worked out well.

P.S. The car’s windshield wipers, unlike many other parts of the car, were perfectly functional. Not that it rained, as I mentioned earlier. Maybe if I knew more about cars I could tell you how cleaning the windshield relates to an overheated engine.