Cars

Since I moved to the Small Town, the word CAR has a new meaning. In the office CAR means Central African Republic, but generally cars seem to be a way of life here. I have already written about the young guys entertaining themselves by racing around the roundabouts on a Tuesday evening and though I never really paid much attention to what their car actually looked like, I know exactly. This is the place for homemade custom Volvos!

You see them everywhere. Old Volvos 740 or 760, from the 80:s or early 90:s but looking nothing the way the car looked when it was new, still not like the real fancy custom cars you can see on TV or in magazines or on exhibitions. No, these are really homemade stuff. Among the standard equipments are of course low profile tyres on aluminium rims, spoilers and some new fancy colour, preferably bicoloured. Then there can be all kinds of extras, no limits! It is soo obvious that there is some young guy who bought the car cheaply and then spent a lot of time and money on it to rebuild it. So it is probably not a matter of money, with all the money spent I am sure they could have bought a newer and cooler car if they wanted but that is not the issue here. To me this is completely incomprehensible!

Even more incomprehensible to me is what one of my neighbours is doing. Almost every day I pass a garage in the area where I live and every afternoon one of the garage doors is open and there is one person and often two or three others are there chatting with him. To be honest I don’t know exactly what the man is doing but he seems to be working on a car. As this man is in his 50:s and seem to be spending all his spare time in this garage I felt pretty sure that the car had to be some very cool old classic veteran car or something like that, and I somehow thought I could understand that you could have that as a hobby. Until the other day when I had a closer look in the garage as I passed and saw that the car is a Hyundai!! How cool is that?!?!

Not even now when I am a car-owner myself can I understand the fascination in cars as such. How you can have cars as a hobby (and then I don’t mean driving!). I am trying not to see my car as just a waste of money and hence an impediment on my oversee travels and therefore I have given it a nickname, to try to personalize it and try to build some kind of relation to it, but I am not sure it works. I am just not a car-person!