I did it again! I fulfilled myself another dream. Since one week I work as a motorbike mechanic. This is not a joke. After buying my bike I went to a mechanic to get luggage racks. While they where fixed on the bike I sat with Tikey, who runs the garage and drank Tchai, very good Indian Tea. I asked him if I could work here for a while, helping out where I can as I never before worked on bikes. To my surprise he agreed and since then I am officially a bike mechanic at Tikeys bike garage- The Enfield specialists. I LOVE IT! I always wanted to be a mechanic, I am fascinated by these machines. During the first week we assembled a bike from scratch. At first there was nothing there except the frame. So we cleaned the engine parts and fixed them on the bike. I took a test ride yesterday. Tikey and Pakshish are my mentors, who explain everything to me in their patient way. They don’t even grasp how they enriched my travel. My working hours are from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening and I am full of oil and grease from top to bottom the whole day. As today is Sunday I have a day off and I can write a little blog entry. To me it is just incredible. I took my gearbox apart yesterday and assembled it again- and it still works. I know what a carburettor is, and how it works- I know what a crank shaft is- and this is all just too good to be true. I found either my new profession or my new hobby.
The bruises club
My right leg hurts. As I look down on it I notice a big blue bruise on my calf and I wonder what I have done to get that. I show it to my mates at the garage, they lift their trousers and they have it as well. Wandering through Arambol I see several people with this big bruise. After some research I find out that every real Enfield biker has this bruise. It comes from kick starting your bike. Sometimes the compression of the engine is so high that there is a strong kickback in the starting lever and it hits you right back on your leg. So you kick your bike and it kicks you back.
Top 5 weirdos in Arambol
Living in a tourist area like Arambol causes mental deceases. The lack of a proper social environment makes a certain type of people live out their dreams in an often strange kind of way. Western social boarders prevent those guys from becoming completely mental, whereas around here there are no such boarders. There are tons of weird people in and around Goa. Following there is a short extract of the “lost souls” of Arambol as we call them.
• The Pirate
There is a guy in Arambol, who actually thinks he is Captain Jack Sparrow. He even looks like him. His mission is to find people for telling them their future using fortune telling cards. The best thing: He always finds them.
• The German mental asylum escapee
The other day I had breakfast at the German Bakery in Arambol, and there is a guy in his 50ies with long grey hair trying to sell his watch to the manager of the German bakery. As I walk up to them in order to get my bill, I ask him why he wants to sell his watch. He tells me that all his money was stolen and he needs to wait for two days to get money from the ATM. So I help him out by lending him some Rupees and keeping his watch as a security. Later in the evening I meet him again giving me back my money as the bank acted quicker than he expected. I did a good thing, I thought, by helping him and eventually it turns out that he is obviously the king of the lost souls. When I go to bars here I constantly see him wearing nothing except his white long pants revealing his astonishing body masses. He usually stands in the middle of the dance floor on a chair waving his hands and body from left to right, pretending to be a sea anemone.
• Bonnie and Clyde
A certain couple lives in Arambol for too long and they actually think that they are Bonnie and Clyde. What they do all day long is cruising through the narrow streets on their motorbike at 20 km/h at least 4 times a day. The guy always wears a white Panama hat, and the ladies head is covered with a tiger bandana, making her look like Rambo without muscles.
• “let me smell your hash”
Sitting in a restaurant and waiting for your food can be fun too. Especially when you all of a sudden notice some strange movement behind your chair. You turn around and there is a guy kneeling behind you naughtily smiling at you, bending over and telling you: “Let me smell your hash”. Thunderstruck you bend away and wonder why your food is taking so long. As you try to avoid any contact to the strange person behind you he takes a chair and places himself in the middle of your friends and explains: “I don’t smoke but I just like the smell of hash, so please let me sit here and smell a little” There couldn’t be a better sign to show you that it is time to leave this place.
• Enlightened priest
Nowhere else in the world there are so many enlightened individuals than in Arambol. Nearly everybody already saw into the soul of the world and is able to tell you how to live your life and what to believe. AND THEY DO! This can lead to having a casual conversation about the size of the waves today and finding yourself 20 minutes later listening to a monologue about the meaning of life and its connection to the ocean. When someone would ask me, I would say: “The meaning of live? Yes, I found it, but it almost killed me by boredom.
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