A Weasel ate our Car.

No, seriously.  A weasel ate our car.

Yesterday: on the way back from Göttingen, the brand-new, just-bought, gute-deutsche-Qualität car all of a sudden started making funny noises and lurching.  The dashboard lit up like potheads in Colorado, sending Host Mom furiously searching through the manual for what all the beeps and blips and your-car-is-fucked lights meant.  In short, they translated to: your car is fucked. Keep in mind, this automobile is less than three weeks old--we picked it up two hours after they picked me up from the airport.  Host Parents were, to say the least, not pleased, thinking they had inadvertently been stuck with a Montagsproduktion--a really shitty car made when the factory workers were still hungover Monday morning that starts having problems almost immediately.

Fast forward to this morning, when I come downstairs to learn that, no, it was not hungover assembly liners, it was a weasel-thing.  A marten, to be exact.  These little bastards are the scourge of Germany, costing car-owners an average of 40 million euros per year.  Because they feed on cars.  Or rather, they dine on the circulatory systems of autos parked in their territory that smell of a different marten. Apparently, Oma and Opa's marten was offended by our marten's stench, and took revenge by chowing down on 360 dollars worth of engine tubing.

All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel.
The weasel ate the monkey's car
So the monkey set it on fire.