As I mentioned in the Feb. 1 post, we bought a car. Today was the day to drive it for the first time. Well, it was the day for Drew to drive it. I'm a big chicken. As of the day I'm writing this, I still haven't driven the car. (Okay, correction - I started this several days ago, and I have now driven the car - yes, we survived.) The original plan this morning had been for me and the kids to take the bus to ASIJ for Greer's swim meet. Drew was going to drive there in the car, using the navigation system. This way we knew Greer would make it on time for her meet. Then after the meet, we would drive the car to Costco. We bought the car from an Australian "transportation provider" named Mick who's been living here for about 20 years. He had sold our friends the Webbs their car, both this stay in Tokyo and their previous stay in Tokyo. The navigation system in the car is all in Japanese, so Drew had Mick program in a handful of destinations for us, including our home, ASIJ, Costco, and Mick's house, so we can drive there if we need him to program something else for us.
I came up with the, if I do say so myself, brilliant idea of walking the kids to the Saturday bus stop, seeing them on the bus, and then walking back to the apartment to drive with Drew to the school. This way I could help him navigate and he wouldn't be on his own. Drew said later that if I hadn't done that, he probably would have eventually given up, driven home (assuming he could find home), and called us to tell us to take the Saturday bus back home after the meet.
Let's start with Drew having to remember to which side of the car to walk when we got to the garage. Yep, that was the first challenge. Then the next challenge was getting out of our immediate neighborhood onto the main road. There's a slight lag with the navigation system (to which we eventually adjusted), which caused us to miss the first right turn we were supposed to take. In trying to compensate for that mistake and in trying to make sure we avoided going the wrong way down any one-way streets, we ended up on a street that was quite narrow. We're pretty sure it was meant for cars to go down it since there were a number of residences along the street that had parking spaces with cars in them. However, it might not have been meant for OUR car to go down it. When we finally decided we needed to turn off it to get to the main road, I had to get out of the car to assist Drew in making a more-than-3-point turn. Some time later, we arrived at the school. I forgot to check to see exactly what time we left so I could determine how long it took us. The school bus takes about 35 minutes, or perhaps a little longer, to make the drive. I do know it took us a good bit longer than that. For one thing, there's a toll road between our house and the school, but somehow we didn't end up on it. We kept missing turns that the navigation system wanted us to take, and in the course of the route recalculations, we must not have made it onto the tollway. Maybe our navigation system didn't think we could handle the tollway. It sure was telling us something in Japanese. However, we did eventually make it, and we arrived at the pool just as they were getting ready to swim the first race. (I should point out that the reason we made it for the first race is that the meet started about 10-15 minutes late. I don't think it was run by a Japanese person.)
Challenge once the meet was over: driving to Costco. ASIJ is in Chofu, which is to the west of us. We were going to the Costco in Kawasaki, which is to the south of us. However, there's no direct route between the two. We pretty much had to drive back towards our house, continue east past it, and then catch a tollway going south. Of course, I don't think I realized at the time that's what we were doing. I was too busy trying to decipher the directions on the navigation system to have any clue about the big picture.
We did, at least, manage to get on the tollway once we left the school. We successfully paid two different tolls, but then we arrived at the third one. Drew attempted to pay 1,000 yen, but the tollbooth operator didn't take it and instead asked him a question. We, of course, had no idea what he was asking and Drew tried again to give him the money. This continued on for a few minutes, with Drew getting increasingly frustrated. When the tollbooth operator started waving around a piece of paper, Drew, who was thinking, "I don't understand what you're saying - how am I going to read that piece of paper?", finally blurted out "I don't speak English!" At that point, probably since I was a little more removed from the situation, I realized that the tollbooth operator was waving around a receipt and he wanted to see our receipt from the previous toll. We produced the receipt, he waved us through, and the kids kept telling Drew, "I bet he's wondering what language you DO speak then, since you don't speak English and you clearly don't speak Japanese." I think it will be awhile before they let him live that one down.
Japanese word of the day: Eigo (click to hear pronunciation) means "English"
Also, I don't think we've had Japanese as our word of the day yet, which clearly we should have, so
Nihongo means "Japanese"
(This refers specifically to the language, not a Japanese person, which would be Nihon-jin.)
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