So get this:
Dubliners use water to remove frost from the windshields of their cars.
WATER!
A fellow employee was making casual conversation when she mentioned that she took water to her car this morning to clean off her windscreen. I stopped to confirm what I’d just heard.
“Sure, that’s right,” she said, and continued with her story.
I reeled. My world shook to its foundations. Water to remove ice?
It’s ludicrous. Wait, no, it’s not. It just might work. It would work, come to think of it.
In Chicago, it would never work, of course. I know this because our rental car this December had no antifreeze in its windscreen washer fluid and Will kept forgetting that and then our windscreen was crusted over at, like, 1000 mph.
But here, where 26 degrees Fahrenheit is “bitter cold,” water is perfect.
Oh my lord.
All week, I wondered why everyone’s windscreens were beautiful while I peered through a scraped-off patch.
“These people can’t all have garages,” I thought.
Oh lord, the people who saw me scraping my windscreen must think I’m a complete idiot.
But I’m not an idiot, just a displaced north-midwestern-American.
2 Comments to “Culture Shock, Frozen Windshield edition”
9 January 2009
Really? This works? That is quite the culture shock.
9 January 2009
Oh, too not have blue streaks running down my car all winter from wiper fluid! I remember at age 16 with my first car buying fluid with no anti-freeze… I drove around with a 3 pound block of ice in my engine until Spring.
Rachel from Iowa