The business was nothing like I had come to know earlier. It was part cafe, part shop for male suits and part auto repair shop. The surprises didn't end there, though. Almost immediately when we arrived, a very stylish Japanese lady appeared speaking the most impeccable English. Which, given our three week experience over here, is beyond rare!
But as if that wouldn't have been enough in itself, it turned out that she had had a Finnish pen pal as a child, and had visited both Helsinki as well as Jyväskylä!
She exchanged a few kind words with us, never letting down her most radiant smile, and proceeded to take us backstage. There we met the mechanic, who would soon eradicate all of our present problems. Or the one big problem. We really had no mind for others at this point.
Without showing much emotion, the mechanic took the trailer, placed it on a base and sanded away the jagged edges where the tubing had cracked. He then turned on his welding machine and soon sparks started flying. I looked at it in awe, knowing well this was beyond all my capabilities. After a few moments, however, the kind lady asked us to go to the cafeteria, so that the welder would have his peace to work. Would we like coffee or tea? Juice, perhaps? They would treat us, naturally!
It turned out that the welder was very pedantic. He didn't just weld the tubes together – no! For him it seemed like a matter of pride that the weld even looked nice. Up to the point that after sanding it smooth, he proceeded to paint the damaged section of the trailer.
When we offered to pay, the owners just shook their heads – it was their pleasure to help. They only wanted a picture for their Facebook page! As for the young man and woman who had driven us to the garage, they too refused all recompense – and in fact bought us a bag of cookies instead. Where do people like this come from!?
It goes against all forms of probability calculations and measures of how lucky one can be, but just one hour after our initial disaster we now had a fixed up trailer attached to the bike and were ready to continue our journey. Could this be true? It almost felt like we were just actors in some drama, without us having to do anything but go with the flow.
No comments:
Post a Comment