True Stories - My first car

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@slobberchops has been doing some posts under the #truestories tag. His latest is a three part epic about buying a car when he lived in the USA. You can use the tag to write about anything. It is an opportunity to work on your writing skills.

Back in 1988 I had just finished my electrical engineering degree (I scraped a pass) and was at a loss for what to do next. My dad had contacts with some companies in Germany and said he could get me a job there. 'Why not?' I thought even though I had failed German O Level and did not think I had much aptitude for languages.

So I ended up taking the train to southern Germany. That was a long journey with just a rucksack of belongings. I eventually arrived in Freiburg to be met by a guy from the company and driven to where I would live. This was a basement apartment in a fairly new building. On the floor above me were my landlady Baerbel, her husband Friedrich and son Markus. On the top floor was Baerbel's dad whose name escapes me. He spoke good English and so did Markus, but Baerbel and Friendrich did not speak it at all.

I was living in the tiny village of Wagensteig in the heart of the Black Forest. Luckily my place of work was just over the road. There was not much to do there with no shops, just a car workshop and a pub. Baerbel would take me to the supermarket each week to stock up on food. After a while she offered to sell me her elderly Fiat 126. It was better than nothing and it was cheap. I think I paid about 800DM for it, but she gave me 100 of that back as a gift.

Fiat

I think they had to drive me somewhere to sort out the insurance. Doing things on-line was not an option back then and I did not even have a computer anyway.

That little car did me very well. It was basic. The windscreen washer was operated by a rubber bulb like a waterpistol. It did not go very fast with its little two-cylinder air-cooled engine, but it could get up the local mountain roads. I did lots of exploring of the area. It had a couple of little levers down by the handbrake. One was the choke and the other activated the starter.

At weekends I would drive into Freiburg where I made some friends and would go to the cinema or shop.

When I first arrived I had to make some effort to learn the language. The people I worked with mostly spoke English, but that was not good enough. I had a set of Berlitz tapes that my dad had used and they were pretty good. Later I went to some classes in Freiburg where I met some nice English girls I hung out with. I have a feeling that was when I had a different car.

Winters in that area could be severe, but we never had too much snow when I was there. I remember one time it snowed when I had not covered the car and when it melted it came through the fabric sunroof. It took a while to dry the car out. I also learned not to try and open the roof whilst driving as the wind would catch it.

I think the car lasted me about a year until something blew on the engine and it was decided it was not worth fixing. At least it never let me down when I was driving.

I had a couple of other cars in my two years in Germany, but that Fiat has a special place in my heart. I may write about the other cars some time, but I will have to see if I have any pictures. I do have some journals I wrote back then, but would need to find them and so I have been working from memory for this post. Scary that this is thirty years ago.

Steem on!

The geeky guitarist and facilitator of the 10K Minnows Project.



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18 comments
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Shame you don't still have it. That would be worth some cash as a "vintage" piece now. You could probably get quite a lot for it in the Hipster community in London :)

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That did cross my mind. Not quite as classic as the original Fiat 500. The new ones are just about Style and lack soul in my opinion. The 'fat' version is just silly.

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A fabric sunroof.... So what about when it was severely pissing down and you were driving... a wet head?

Is that the actual car?

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That is the car. I think it was okay in a shower, but having the melting snow pooling there meant it could get over the raised lip. I don't think I got wet otherwise.

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Might have been better if it was marketed for more fair weather countries. Wouldn't have been good here!

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Mine was exactly the same color, except the fabric roof.

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Cool. I expect a lot of them were made, but most will have rusted away.

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Around 4.7M in total. Mine was made in Yugoslavia and we called it Zastava 126. They rusted even faster than originals from Italy.

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The year I was born, one year later the Berlin wall went down, how was Germany back then?

That little car looks like fun and super easy to work on, I bet one could take the engine out, fix it and put it back in a day (I did that sort of job in a week with my old car which has a gigantic V8 on it). Today we open the hood an can barely see the engine without taking tons o plastic from around it.

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Germany was good. Nice people. I went to Berlin to see what was going on and I chipped off some bits of wall.

I have done minor work on cars, but I expect the Fiat engine was more like a motorbike. It was squeezed into a small space. Engines seem a lot more complex now.

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I love this!

I bought my first car in spring 1999, it was a 1981 light blue Chevy Monte Carlo, it drove like a boat. I loved it and drove it for 2yrs while it rotted underneath me.

When I went back to university I left it home and didn’t buy another car for 11yrs and I still have that, a 2006 Passat.

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I think the Fiat was quite nice to drive and dead easy to park. It's never been about speed for me.

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(Edited)

Fiat 126p.
Yup, it was dream of Polish people in late coldwar era. We called it "Maluch" (Lil One, or Small boy). It was made since 1973 up until 2000 in Poland. My father had one. I got my driving licence on it. Cheap, simple car. You could simply repair it with a screwdriver and piece of wire or old stocking. Or put it in your pocket and carry it to the nearest car shop. Nowadays companies brought back such little cars but they are spaceships compared to "Maluch".

Tom Hanks got one.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/16546/polish-town-buys-tom-hanks-an-old-fiat-126-as-a-birthday-present
True story.

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I am not sure where mine was built. It was really easy to park as you could get into spaces others couldn't use.

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That is pretty awesome. I can't imagine just up and leaving the country like that to go to my first job. I think my first job was right in town. We had a car at one point that was supposed to be a four cylinder. We didn't find out until much later that only two of the cylinder were actually working!

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(Edited)

Having lived away at university it was not too different, but going somewhere I did not really speak the language was a little scary. I think it did me some good at being more independent. I think more people should experience other cultures and then they might be less quick to judge them.

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