a new parabrezza

The car is finally in regola (regulation). How long have we been working on that? Yet another example of the difference in viscosity of this culture compared with our own. (I’ll blog about that viscosity thing another time – for the most part, I like Italy’s viscosity but sometimes it causes a major p-in-the-a)

Remember the hoopla with the car? The whole police thing about no tags or stickers and then the inspectors and the turn signal that clicks too quickly? Well, on Monday we took the car to the mechanic to get all these stupidaggine (little stupid things) fixed. The owner of the shop looked at the list of items to be fixed and then looked at the car. One of the items was that there were three of those little dings that pebbles make when they hit the windshield. He promptly declared he would be putting in a whole new windshield. The discussion went like this:
“Yeah, you’ll need a new windshield.”
“A NEW windshield?! Can’t you just patch this one. I mean, those marks are really small.”
“Ahhhh, welllll, there used to be a German lady who came here and would do that work. She used fire and everything. But she went away. So you need a new windshield.”

The moral of the story….when in doubt, blame the Germans and charge the Americans.