Drawing comparisons with the animated seven-year-old heroine Dora the Explorer, an intrepid expat has crossed into the wild borderlands of Belgium to buy a used children’s bicycle.
Caroline Curagis says that she was inspired to make the journey into the wild on Monday morning after spotting an advert for the item on Facebook Marketplace.
“Only twenty-five euros, a deal so good as to be treasure,” she said. “The only problem was that the bike was in a forbidding land called Wallonia, kept in a little-known hamlet called Habay.”
Curagis prepared for the adventure by consulting a map, charging her Tesla, and practicing how to say “My name is Caroline” and “I am here to buy the bicycle” in the local tongue.
For companionship, she brought along fellow expat and friend Beatriz Muñoz, who adopted the nickname Boots during the adventure and only spoke in obnoxious monkey chatter.
Forty-six minutes after departing from Curagis’s house in the Belair neighborhood of Luxembourg City, the two women arrived at the seller’s house. However, that’s when a serious challenge arose.
“The door was opened by an older woman who was most certainly not the woman from Facebook, so we were like uh-oh,” Muñoz reported. “I mean, eep eep, whoop eep.”
“The old woman was like, ‘my doctor, my doctor,’” Curagis said. “I was afraid we were about to get kidnapped and that our kidneys would be removed with a rusty scalpel by a tattooed criminal named Butcher – or Boucher, as it were.”
However, after some rather graphic gestures indicating giving birth, Curagis and Muñoz understood that the older woman was indicating that the seller was her daughter, not doctor, and that she was selling the bike on her daughter’s behalf.
The purchase was carried out without any further complications. However, oh the way back,
Curagis’s GPS led them astray, and the two friends ended up in wild, lawless land called Libramont-Chevigny where the car’s tire blew out.
“Luckily, we were rescued by a car mechanic and village chieftain named Cedric,” said Curagis. “He has invited me to be his bride and rule over Libramont-Chevigny as his queen, which is tempting except that my husband doesn’t know I’m here, and in an hour I need to pick up my kids from school.”
