Driving Like Rainman

A weird thing happened to me yesterday while driving to our local mall.

Nobody beeped at me.

When we first got here, driving was a complete nightmare. The steering wheel is on the right side of the car (which shouldn't be that big a deal but it is) and we drive on the left side of the road (which is FREAKY). I can't tell you how many times I've turned on my blinker and had the windshield wipers sweep across instead. The blinker lever is on the right. It takes some getting used to, as does looking right first and then left when merging into traffic.

Then, there is the whole width/depth perception thing. When you learn to drive sitting on the left side, the sense of how wide your car is is just one of those things you absorb without thinking about it. Switching over to the right side has twisted my spatial skills into a knot. I now park like an asshole. If I were still in the States, my car would have been keyed by now. Don't even get me started on parallel parking. Embarrassing. Horror. Show.

Oh, and the traffic circles....they are absurd. You approach one and either turn on the blinkers left or right to indicate which spoke you are taking which is not as simple as it sounds because you must go left to go right. It's fucked. At the beginning, I either kept going around, unsure of which bloody road to take or I sat at the opening of the roundabout, heart pounding trying to get it straight in my head before venturing out into traffic. I got beeped at the most, there.

In this country, you are not allowed to make a turn on a red light. I'm not sure who clued me into this fact but it was long after I had made several illegal lefts into the flow of traffic and before any police officer had caught me (thank God). There are also a couple of rules regarding yielding the right of way (that make NO SENSE AT ALL) that I have unwittingly broken. For instance, if I want to turn right and the car approaching me wants to turn left into the same street, he has to yield to me. It's lovely and courteous but a nutty rule which I've unintentionally disobeyed to the sound of honking horns and wild hand gestures.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I drove to the mall without thinking about it. I negotiated the roundabouts while contemplating my shopping list. I zipped into an open space in a jammed parking lot and later, drove home, mentally trying to calculate how much I'd spent and what I'd be making for dinner. I was on autopilot and surprisingly, there were no beeps and no middle fingers thrust in my general direction. I have been avoiding the motorway (freeway) for fear of orphaning my children or someone else's children. Perhaps today, with my new found confidence, is the day to tackle that hurdle where the fast lane is to the right and exits to the left.

Then again, maybe not.

I'm an excellent driver. But not on Friday, definitely not on Friday.