After the blog about my Euroweenie 106 XR was released, thousands of American car buffs e-mailed me asking for more information - although none showed any interest in actually buying the car. So, here goes, and I’ll try not to lose the rest of my readers by getting too technical.
I’ll start with the engine. Yes, it’s got one, although I haven’t yet found it, but something’s burning gas, unless there’s a leak in the tank. There’s no radio because that drains too much power from the aforementioned engine, particularly if you’re going up a slope while playing anything by Abba. There is no rev counter because Peugeot wanted to hide the fact that the Euroweenie motor idles at 5,000RPM, but there is a large clock so it’s easy to gauge acceleration. After exhaustive tests I can assure you the Euroweenie 106 XR zooms from 0-60MPH between 3:00-3:25PM.
Next, wheels and steering. The Euroweenie’s wheels are roughly the size and thickness of an Oreo cookie. And probably about as sturdy. The tires are so narrow there’s no space for treads, just one wiggly line down the middle looking a bit as if it were drawn by a one-eyed ten-year-old boy with hiccups and a magic marker. They might also be solid rubber – or cookie dough.
The steering is a marvel of Belgian engineering and a credit to a nation of fine lace-makers. The steering-wheel is firmly connected to the front wheels by four rubber bands: two thin, two thick, one of each per wheel. Turning the steering wheel from rest is easy because the thin rubber bands stretch. Then at speeds over 40 KPH (about 150 MPH) the thick bands take over and you drive with the sudden understanding that although fine control of the vehicle is a bit elusive, life is truly precious. It usually helps that no other car on the road will come within 5 kilometers (175 feet) of a moving Euroweenie 106 XR.
The Euroweenie has power-windows, one per side because it is a two-door sporty vehicle, but they’re each powered by six AA Duracell batteries stuffed in holes in the door arm-rests and don’t last long. Four ups, three downs and you’re about out of juice, and these Euroweenie windows neatly disprove the old adage that what goes up must come down.
The locking gas tank can only be opened with a pair of pliers because the key is broken and there’s a mere stalk left - or maybe it came that way to deter theft and encourage frugality. The gas tank shows half-full while going uphill and nearly empty going downhill, so when I’m low on fuel I try to drive uphill as much as possible. At least I did until someone pointed out that the little engine uses more gas going uphill than down, so it all works out about the same.
And gas is expensive. A liter of gas costs about ninety euros and in warm weather there are approximately twenty five liters to an American gallon. For easy reckoning, twenty dollars equals about a euro and a half and the dollar is pegged directly to the day’s temperature in Celsius.
The Euroweenie runs on unleaded, in Portuguese charmingly called sem chumbo, which to my cultured American ear sounds an awful lot like Sammy Jumbo.
The Euroweenie 106 XR has a five-speed gearbox - automatic transmission being unknown in Portugal. But not all gears are connected to the engine. First gear is because you’ve got to get going somehow, and usually second gear is too so the engine isn’t screaming its valves off after a few minutes. The other gears are only incidentally linked to the engine. They’re cleverly routed through something quite unique. The Portuguese name for it is beyond me to translate, let alone pronounce, but the nearest thing in American would be revverizer.
The revverizer makes all the appropriate sounds as you shift through the gears, BUT none of this in any way affects the speed of the car. You can flash up and down the gearbox like a really good race-car driver, right hand a blur, little legs pumping madly away at the pedals as you look serious leaning hard into the curves, and all the while creating just wonderful sounds. But it’s all quite safe because you’re only doing 50KPH (12MPH) and saving sem chumbo like a sem champ.
And while we’re discussing driving, let me mention European drivers. Now in America we’ve got acres of land, millions of cars and lots of Mafia-owned concrete companies, so our highways are really wide with dozens of lanes. As all Americans are created equal they have an equal right to drive in any damn lane they want and at any damn speed they like. Not so over here. The lane(s)on the left are for folks driving faster than you and it’s best to stay out of them. Otherwise you’re likely to get a honking great Mercedes so far up your tail its fancy hood ornament will leave a permanent impression on the back of your neck.
Portuguese cars also have this amazing little device that really should be standard on all cars, particularly American ones, and everyone here uses them. A short stick pokes sideways out of the steering column and as you’re about to make a turn, you push it up for right or down for left, and blinking lights on the outside of the car tell other drivers which way you’re going. It’s a safe and considerate signal for fellow motorists and someone has to bring it to the States. They’d make a fortune, surely.
And then there are roundabouts, or rotundas as the Portuguese call them. We, of course, know them as traffic circles and they scare us witless. But they’re actually much better than the American eight-way stop intersections where you’re supposed to let the guy on the right go first, but your car’s nicer than his and you’re in a rush and pretend you lost count as you wave an apology and miss him by a millimeter - that’s almost six inches. Stop signs stop traffic while rotundas keep everything moving.
We Americans are rightly terrified of rotundas, but they’re very easy to use if you just follow the Portuguese method of entry. When approaching one, slow down, look to your left and then accelerate, regardless of traffic, unless it’s a gigantic semi loaded with abacaxis - pineapples - just showing off my Portuguese vocabulary. Once in pole position, if you miss your turn keep going around and around, accelerating all the while, just as if it was your very own miniature NASCAR race-track, and then use your accumulated speed to slingshot away down the right exit before you get dizzy and throw up. Space shuttle pilots exiting the atmosphere, whirling Dervishes getting closer to God and professional skaters screwing themselves into the ice have no difficulty with this manouevre -- and neither will you with practice.
Now, even if you’ve never been farther away from home than around the block, let alone to a foreign country, you’ll still be aware that people do things differently out there. And if you have actually been to another country - excluding Canada, of course, which might as well be in America - you’ll know that things can get very strange. Maybe we should re-include Canada; Canadians can be very odd sometimes. Eh?
For example, I am an American living in Portugal, a country very different from ours, yet sometimes I buy my bread from the Arizona Bakery - which is actually a truck parked outside a huge palace. How about that one for weird, then?
One thing you will discover immediately in a foreign country is that most of the inhabitants speak little or no English. This is a great handicap for them in struggling to communicate with you. But be patient because they will catch on eventually, and do try not to show your amusement when they say something silly. And rest assured they will.
The farther away you go from home, the stranger things can get. I’m informed that in China they love eating fish-lips. I suppose with all those billions of people competing to be fed you have to eat what’s put in front of you and pretend you like it. Maybe to a Chinese kid a bowl of fish lips look just like Cheerios.
So the trick to successful foreign travel is to expect the unexpected and not be put off by it. That doesn’t mean you have to eat fish-lips if there’s a perfectly good McDonald’s within a hundred miles.
I’ve travelled extensively all over the world and I’m always learning something new. Yesterday I found out that Portuguese potatoes have legs. Scrawny vestigial legs, but legs nonetheless. This came as a surprise, but as a veteran traveler it was not a shock and I took the information in my globe-trotting stride. The only question I had was, what happens to all the legs when the potatoes are turned into french fries? Perhaps the French like them. They’ll eat any damn thing and say it tastes good, even if it’s really horrible. They do this primarily to annoy Americans and have been at this nonsense ever since we defeated them in the Vietnam War and banned those silly-looking Citroen cars from our highways.
I did venture into the french-fry plant, a place called Ti Ti. In Portuguese it’s pronounced Tee Tee, but any ubiquitous little boy who speaks English knows, shall we say, a more titillating pronunciation. I wanted to learn more about the spud-legs, but unfortunately no one there was educated enough to explain the facts in simple English. A few of them laughed in reply to my question, but that’s what a foreigner will do when faced with his linguistic failings.
This brings me naturally to my new steam-iron. It’s called the IRON STAR and looks very smart, all swoopy blue racing stripes on gleaming white plastic. It’s not an expensive one, in fact it was the cheapest iron I could find at 9 euros and 99 bits of a euro - about $150. I wonder if a European financial expert is called a eurologist?
It looked simple enough to operate and even though I’m a man I do have some prior experience with irons. But then I foolishly did what no man should ever do - I read the instruction manual. Or at least I tried to. The Iron Star manual is written in no less than eleven different languages for the European Union countries. Can you imagine such a thing for something as basic as an iron?
We get a bit bent out of shape in the US of A when an automatic telephone answering system asks us to press uno for Spanish, or two for English. What if we had to press eleven for English? That could be the end of our language and American way of life, folks, because there is no eleven on a telephone!
The languages are: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Netherlandish, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian and Greek. With my extensive travel experience, I of course read most of the instructions in the original languages and was struck by their inaccuracy. Each seemed to get farther and farther away from the first one, which should by logic and seniority have been English, anyway, not German.
I checked the maker’s address to discover it was not made in China, but at 1322 Himmelsburger Strasse in Germany. That explained the language order and also such strange phrases as: “You’d better put the water in the right way,” or, “it is quite normal for stinks to come when iron is first using hot.” Easy for you to say, mein Herr Fritz, and the start of all the problems.
After that tragic beginning, things went haywire and I’m sure each translator did his work then handed his version onto the next man. It must have been a bit like that kid’s game where you all sit in a circle and whisper a message to each other. What comes out at the end bears no relationship to what went in at the beginning. Thus it was with the Iron Star manual. So, an instruction in German that reads, “WARNUNG: Auf keinen Fall die Bugelsohle beruhnen, solange sie noch nicht abgekuhit ist! I would translate quite easily as, “NOTE: Turning iron upside down to press armpits while wearing garment is not advised.” Simple, really and quite sensible. But by the time we got to the Greek this straightforward instruction now read, ““Do not look at that duck funny because it will explode.”“ Although my Greek is a bit rusty I know enough to translate that line as, “Do not look at the duck funny or it will explode.”
There you are then, the perils of multi-culturalism. The European Union might be a good enough idea on paper, but in reality it’s a place where in Germany some folk try to iron their armpits and have to be warned not to, while in Greece one wrong look and a duck blows up in your face. I blame the Germans, over here they start most things that cause trouble.
Give me, press uno for Spanish, por favor any day. God bless America.
Tradition is all very nice, but it does tend to go on far too long and doesn’t seem to change much. If you’re not careful, it can end up being the same damn thing all the time.
That’s why American traditions, outside those silly ones the Texas A & M football team invent and then cling to as if they mean something, are always being refreshed. That’s why we demolish any building built before 1965 and buy a new car every two years. It’s also why the Los Angeles Goodwill stores are full of clothes that still have the price tags. You have to admit, it can get boring looking at the same stuff, day after live-long day. Innovative thinking is what we do best in the US of A and I’ll give you a perfect example.
My neighbor in our Portuguese village is a shepherd and owns a bunch of big brown sheep he takes to pasture on his burro - they walk, he rides the burro. He lives at the bottom of the hill and the pasture-land is at the top. Now, every morning he gets aboard his trusty burro and herds the sheep up the hill. They chomp away at the grass all day, converting it into wool, meat and those black marbles they poop incessantly, and then he herds them home. It’s all very traditional and unbelievably quaint, but is it efficient?
I did a little cost analysis and came to this conclusion. Traditional it may very well be, but it ain’t good business practice. I explain thus: the sheep trundle two miles uphill, burning calories and ejecting little black marbles every inch of the way. Then they eat grass until it’s time to go home the same way they came up. If, for the sake of argument, they expend ten units of energy on their journey and gain ten units of energy from eating, then all this wandering about the landscape is for nothing. Surely it would be better to let them stay at home and maybe give each one them a Power Bar and some multivitamins?
I’m not even adding the time/energy of the shepherd and his burro into the equation. If the sheep stayed in one place they wouldn’t need to go galloping all over Portugal. He could find a job, say in a factory making Portuguese souvenirs - little statues of shepherds are popular with the tourists - and the burro could be put to work giving thousands of overweight bratty kids a ride on the beach. That’s efficiency for you and tradition put in the right perspective.
But it’s no good explaining this to him because even with all those hours with nothing to do but stare at sheep he hasn’t taken the time to learn English, and it’s all a bit too complicated for his simple rustic mind anyhoo.
Then there’s the other neighbor, the one who looks like Mussolini -- but is much nicer. He’s old, there’s no getting around that, and so is his wife - one of the sweetest old ladies you’ll ever meet. His son, who happens to be my landlord, visits his parents every day, driving up that steep hill from the village below. What a great son. Then, every other day a van (a Citroen Jumpy) bounces up to our farm and the baker pops out and sells bread. Good bread it is too; still warm and wonderful with my coffee for breakfast.
This has been going on for donkey’s years, so it’s become a tradition in a way. And there’s the problem. The more efficient American way would be to slide Gramps and Grandma into a nice clean nursing home where they’d have cable TV and company and meals made for them. Then the son wouldn’t have to slog uphill everyday and could renovate the cottage and rent it to German tourists every summer. The nursing home folk would make a little bit of money to tide them over and the baker could stay behind his counter out of the weather. It’s win win all the way around, which shows how it’s always always wise to let the marketplace decide what’s best. Of course, I wouldn’t get my fresh warm rolls for breakfast anymore, but hey, isn’t that why they made frozen food and microwaves?
Then there’s the kissing-women-thing tradition. In Portugal if you meet a woman you know, you’re supposed to kiss her on both cheeks instead of sensibly saying Hi or shaking hands, or high-fiving if she’s a cool chick. The kissing thing sounds charming, but it gets to be a real problem fast. Let’s say you walk into a business meeting where there are half a dozen guys and half a dozen women. You all start kissing each other on the cheek and pretty soon the place looks like it’s filled with a bunch of bobbing penguins. And if you screw it up by starting with the wrong cheek – always the right side is kissed first – all hell breaks loose. You can smash your nose into someone’s face or get an earful of some babe’s chin. It can ugly real fast, and God forbid you count wrong and miss one, or kiss Carlos by mistake. Hi, hon, gimme five, works just fine for me.
As I said, tradition has its place, there’s no denying that, but it’s only good when it doesn’t go on too long or get into multiple kissing. So be a man, an American man, shake that hand, flatten that building and buy yourself a new Cadillac.
I am an American. Not by birth, but by admiration and subsequently naturalization. This makes me more American than a native-born American because I chose to become one, it wasn’t just the happy accident of having the right parents. And, being an American, I love my car, which is also American. Forgive me, I should have said it was American. Now I live in Portugal and no longer drive American. Instead I own a Euroweenie 106 XR.
Back to America for some reference points. I arrived in the States from Britain over thirty years ago and have always driven American automobiles. It’s my way of being patriotic, of giving something back to my adopted country, even as the American car-makers bought up foreign companies and out-sourced everything.
Back in the seventies I briefly drove a Volkswagen Fastback (that’s a misnomer if ever there was one), but the engine fell out one day when I was turning left on Robertson Boulevard in west Los Angeles and that was that. Over the years I’ve owned Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Jeeps and Chevrolets. My last vehicle was a honking great Chevy Silverado extended-cab pickup truck with a manly V-8 motor that took me all over the country while gleefully sucking the world’s known oil reserves dry. Alas, it had to be sold when I left to live in Portugal. But at least it went to a friend.
Which naturally brings me to the Japanese, those fine makers of automobiles and samurai movies, and that leads on to how each country names its vehicles. I’ve been told Japan has cars called Daisy, Bluebell, and Serenity. And of course there is the Civic and also the Accord. All pleasant enough names, which undoubtedly reflects the Japanese character, while the Germans, naturally, rely on numbers. The Americans, a peace-loving people, opt for such monikers as Barracuda, Charger, or Buick Belligerent. I made the last one up, but you get the idea. Laugh all you like at the American names, though, but for real chuckles the Europeans have them beaten all ways up.
In my short time driving around Portugal I’ve encountered such names as: Kangoo, Sporty, Fabia, Partner, Caddy, Sunny, Leon, and my favorite of them all - Jumpy, smaller version of the Jumper. I swear to God I make none of this up. Maybe cruising around America, securely encased in tons of Detroit steel for thirty years has removed me from reality, but there is no way I can imagine going into a bar, winking at some babe and trying to impress her by casually mentioning I own a Jumpy. Maybe a Fabia. No, not even a Fabia. And the thought of what might happen if you put a Kangoo and Jumpy together in a dark garage overnight boggles the mind.
Of course all of this philosophizing is simply a way for me to avoid discussing my car, the Euroweenie 106 XR. When I came to Portugal I decided to buy a cheap car. Then, in a year or so, once I was settled, I would get something more substantial. Enter the Euroweenie 106 XR. It was made by Peugeot, which I think was once long ago a Belgian company, and if it’s not, we should mention poor little Belgium anyway because no one ever does. Belgium, a country renowned for...um, for being surrounded on all sides by France, the Netherlands, and I believe Pakistan.
They speak two languages in Belgium, French and Pantaloon, and so fiercely do the respective speakers hold to their native tongue that some wives cannot communicate with their husbands. Or want to. It’s such a divided country no one can agree on anything and so the Belgians drive down the middle of the road. But they do make fine chocolate and lovely lace. Their cars, however, are a different matter.
I bought the Euroweenie 106 XR used for 800 Euros, which at today’s exchange rate is about $40,000. How the mighty dollar hath fallen! The man who sold it to me, a friend of a friend, assured me it was a good reliable vehicle, “except sometimes the lights go up and down.” I thought he meant the Euroweenie rolled its eyes in disgust whenever I did something American while driving - such as talking on the cellphone, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper as I steered with my knees - but no, it was just his way of explaining that at times, usually when they were most desperately needed, the lights would go off. And stay off until they damn well wanted to come back on again.
My friend of a friend has taken the car to mechanics across Europe, but they all shrugged and said, “It’s a Peugeot Euroweenie 106 XR,” as if that explained everything. Which I guess it does. It does explain why Belgium no longer makes cars. I can only imagine the horrendous accidents that occurred as thousands of Belgians hammered down the highway (the middle of the highway, remember) then suddenly all went blind as the lights failed and they smashed into each other.
So I guess I should be grateful for the Euroweenie 106 XR because it’s probably the only one of its kind left alive. And at least it’s not a Jumpy. Or a Jumper.
