Trip to Timişoara.
Perhaps this is when I bought those books to learn chinese, printed in german. There's some german minority in the area, so they imported some amount from DDR (aka GDR). Tried for a while to at least learn a few characters, of which I still recognize perhaps two. It did serve as a diversion while I was cramming for exams.
While these exams were not just a few, I had some distance between now and diploma, I was considered not a student anymore, not attending any classes, that part's over, so granma decided to treat me with a bike. To give the money, that is, I'd pick one that I'd like. So I went to that shop at the middle of Lesnina, where they had them. Now whether the shop already belonged to Bangro, or was it later that the directive to consolidate local commerce came out, don't quite remember. I looked at what they had and noticed one black, male, three-speed transmission in-the-head, asked the clerk how do these gears go. You better don't touch that, the guy pronounced coolly. Ah, another exemplar of an expert clerk as I always run into. If it's anything technical and newer than the time when his teaching majstor was learning it, you can safely rely on him to know nothing about it. Just like four years ago, when I was looking for a polarizing filter, what loads of rubbish I heard from the clerks, ouch with a triple aitch.
Of course, I took exactly that one. It served me faithfully for some seven years, summer-winter. What did it in eventually was our mix of mud, salt and sand which covered the streets in winter and found its way into the bearings. The gears may have stayed intact, but the balls in the bearings weren't spherical anymore.