Moin Moin

A common greeting not only in Low Saxon speaking areas but in areas that were formerly dominated by the Hanseatic League. It literally means Good good.  Originally though it was a part of a greeting where you wished someone a Moien Dag, a good day. After a long time though, the Dag was dropped and the moin was doubled to become today's Moin Moin.

I thought I was going to be done with these reflections on life in the Saxonlands a long time ago but things keep comming up that I had failed to mention previously. In this sense it is rather like the peat bogs. For example, you would think, wouldn't you, that after a season of digging peat that the bogs would revert to vast expanses of open water? Not so. This is only a temporary condition. After the removal of the top layer of peat, the loss of weight causes the peat underneath to slowly push up so that by the time it comes to dig peat again, the bog looks like an unending expanse of land, like peat had never been dug out here before. Now, I could have mentioned this before but it seemed so obvious. On reflection it occurred to me that very probably no one reading this has ever dug peat out of a bog before. Then too, I was afraid that everyone reading this would fall asleep reading a long dissertation on peat bogs.  Perhaps they are falling asleep reading my accounts anyway.  I just don't know.

In regard to the three wheeled trucks that I previously mentioned, the end of the war found Germany with the greatest concentration of ace fighter pilots in the world. For some reason or other, the allies did not want these men to continue to ply their trade. There were thus a huge number of decommissioned fighters that no one had any use for.  Some shrewd cookie then thought to use the front wheel assembly to build a three wheeled truck. An added advantage was the fact that German tax law taxed motor vehicles by the number of wheels. These trucks could be built unbelievably cheaply because turning the steering wheel turned the whole motor assembly. No drive shaft, differential or any of that nonsense.