The helmet mount for my action camera broke the very first time
I was in Bendery, Transnistria. A curious bystander who saw me trying to put it back together with super glue referred me to the shop on the street corner — the owner Alex briefly stopped what he was doing to acknowledge my existence, gazed at the broken mount for a couple of seconds, then reached down to a very heavy box overflowing with all shapes and sizes of nuts and bolts — “here you go, if you can find what you need in there, it’s yours!” — and swiftly went back to what he was doing.
It was clearly implied that Alex is the local repairman — while
The helmet mount was neither the first nor the last item in my kit to malfunction — but it appears to have marked the moment when the repair mindset kicked in
In my previous life,
The decision now was a little more difficult though —
From holes in my clothes to the voltage stabilizer for my hub dynamo, upgrading or extending the lifespan of what not very long ago i might have thrown away at worse or surrendered to the expensive care of a specialist at best often turned out to be just a matter of understanding how it works, plus the interested ingenuity of a local.
Who’s wealthier?
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Featured photo: my “brand new” helmet mount, which several weeks after the fix was still working perfectly well — and still is! ( Ukraine, May ’17 )
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‘ Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)
Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring; worldwide, Denmark,Transnistria, Ukraine
