Well as they say, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy -- and Mike too. So a 2-3 months back I managed to snaffle a 1967 Ford Fairlane here in Arequipa. Much, much cheaper and easier getting one here in South America than Australia, that's for sure ;-)
And what a magnificent tank it is! It is so utterly Peruvian it's ridiculous... no end of small fixes, codges, hacks, work-arounds... call them what you will, but in the 55 years since rolling off the production line (probably in Mexico or Argentina; I'm still trying to find someone who can decipher the chassis number) it has been coaxed along with the bare minimum of expense. So, when a fuse blows, what do you do? Get some thin copper wire wound between the terminals. Or when the indicator stalk breaks off, what do you do? Just mount a switch on the dashboard. And when all the other things like horn, windscreen squirter, hazard lights, etc. drop off the perch... yes, more switches on the dashboard! And if the heater dies, yes just rip it out and throw it away. A minimalist South American-built Ford is my dream car!
Yes, the original 289 V8 is once again purring like a Peruvian panther. As you can see in the shot above, I had to pull the water pump for a recon. job. The ignition system was a bit ropey too, but I've found THE shop here in Arequipa which stocks most of the critical bits for old American tanks, so we're in clover.
But there's no point in having a tank if one doesn't have a licence to drive the thing, is there. So yesterday saw me going for my driven test, the last step in getting my Peruvian drivers licence. Did we mention that things are very different here in Peru? So this driving test is run on a sort of mini course, complete with tiny little roads and tiny little intersections. And you drive tiny little cars (some Chevrolet the size of a roller skate) and have to park them in impossibly tiny little parking spaces.
Which of course was my undoing yesterday. The parking thing is the very last hurdle you have to clear -- and I was doing well until that last hurdle. Now in my 4 hours of lessons prior to the test, not once did I touch any of the cones or barriers. But suddenly, at the very last moment, I touched one and a rather unkind and savage alarm went off... and it was all over red rover. Grrr... now I have no way of proving this, but I am fairly sure that the parking space I was directed to was significantly smaller than the others. Which, I am told, is typical; the system is designed to fail people most of the time. So you have to go and pay for another test on another day, etc. So I'm booked in for next week. <sigh>
Well, all play and no work makes Jack a frivolous boy. So after the failed ordeal yesterday at getting my licence, it was off to the Tuesday night lecture at the theol. college with SIM colleague Ben Marx. Ben had coaxed me into preparing a 15-minute mini-lecture on an aspect of the resurrection. So I delivered my first little Spanish spiel to the students on 1 Cor. 15: 3-5, exploring how Jesus' resurrection "on the third day" is "according to the Scriptures". I mean, there's no Bible verse per se that says that the Messiah will rise on the third day. So in what sense is the third day dealt with in the Old Testament Scriptures? Well, you can have a crack at answering that yourself, and in a future post I'll share the guts of what I said to the students.
In the meantime, let's rejoice in this: that the resurrection of Jesus the Christ is indeed "according to the Scriptures"; that the Grand Expectation of all the OT Scriptures has been fully met and fulfilled in Jesus. Christ is risen; and so we know that our work in the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). And that means it's GAME ON!
