Waiting
Since I got back to Australia, I have one main concern: to get rid of my car. It didn’t happen yet, but I keep an optimic spirit - the situation around is much better than in was a month ago.
I spent most of the past three days at the car market, trying to sell my car. The problem is the high milage (over 400,000 k”m, before the odometer broke) which scares many potential costumers before I have a chance to really talk to them. However, between 4-5 cars are sold daily, and I own the most popular model, so my turn is bound to come, the sooner the better.
Besides staying in the car market I moved a hostel - I decided that there is not much point in staying at Bondi (the jewish outskirt of Sydney) and going every day to kings-cross for the market. I did not want to stay in kings-cross, which is really a bad neighbourhood - at the night it becomes a place of the drunken and centre for the sex-industry, and has a just fearful reputation. The solution came unexpectedly at friday night, when I attended the free dinner at the Habad house, and met Zohar.
Zohar is a guy that just arrived at Australia a few days ago, after traveling with his girlfriend on asia - china, mongolia, and other places that I still need to visit. She had to come back to Israel, and he would stay some months in Australia before returning. I sold him my guidebook to australia and gave him some advices; and he told me about the hostel in which he lives, which is at the very centre of Sydney (Pitt street, if someone’s interested), and turned out to be better, cheaper, and much much more central than where I’ve been - so I moved there.
The car market is at the basement of a five-floor parking building. Sellers stay there usually between 2-12 days, and a nice dynamic is evolving. There is a nice tradition, that anyone who sells his car brings beers to all the rest, so you get a few free drinks during the day. It is interesting to see the costumers that come to buy. Most of them don’t really know what they want, and certainly don’t know to check the vehicles; but almost nobody is taking the cars to a professional mechanical inspection, as it is expensive and they only care about money; nor that it would be helpful - all the cars are old (12-25 years), had numerous owners, and were badly treated - almost all have oil leaks, holes in the exhaust, and other characteristics of old miss-treated cars, that should be moved out of the road for the safety of their drivers rather than go around australia over and over again, until they break up under their last unfortunate owner, usually in themiddle of the desert. Thus, any mechanical inspection would produce a long list of downfalls (which at the time I used to bargain my car really good), but produce little useful information.
One of the things I noticed is that people buy the cars on purely emotional basis. They would go around, get hooked on a car for some reason (colour? brightness? camping gear?) and than take it - regardless of its absolute condition, price, or anything else. They just take it because they like it. A very interesting behaviour on behalf of mostly intelligent and money-pressed young people.
Anyhow, all this doesn’t help me much. I just need the one that will get hooked on my specific car. He will probably arrive tommorow.
October 10th, 2005 at 17:47
Or the day after tomorrow, or after or after- what’s the hurry ( as long as you get your daily rational of beers?)