Everything About Cars is a Pain
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Bangkok, Thailand, where I’ve been swamped-busy all week, and am squeaking this out a few minutes later than usual.
“Everything about cars is a pain in the ass”—Lee
Occasionally, we love to rent a car and go for a road trip. We’re always thrilled to drive away from the rental agency; it’s as if the world looks completely different from behind a windshield. We can see neighborhoods and scenery we’d otherwise miss. Days flow according to our whims, rather than the bus schedule.
But a week or two later, when we pull back into the rental parking lot and walk away from the car, we’re just as thrilled all over again. A car puts us squarely at the intersection of freedom and responsibility. Confession: we prefer the freedom part.
We’ve been defeated by narrow roads, incomprehensible driver’s manuals, and completely mysterious signage. We’ve turned in cars with dings and scratches and chipped windshields. We’ve struggled to remember which side of the road to drive on.
As a matter of fact, in Bonaire a few months ago, we discovered that you even have to be very careful about which side of the gas pump you’re on. Enter the wrong way, & everyone around will come over & lecture you.
And then there’s parking. During the week we spent in Fes, Morocco, the king visited the city, and our hotel parking lot was emptied and closed, for security. We had to find somewhere to park. Have you ever seen a photo of a Moroccan medina? The medina in Fes is considered the oldest urban pedestrian zone in the world. I’m not sure there’s a worse place IN THE WORLD to try and find a parking space. Finally, a bunch of kids offered to help us park, and absurd shenanigans ensued, amongst which were Lee trying to wedge our little whatever-it-was into a space that was only slightly smaller than our whatever-it-was, kids swarming us for tips, and our absolute conviction that we’d never be able to find that stupid car again. We found it again, all right. And it still had all its parts—including a long, wide abrasion, all the way down the driver’s side.
Actually, finding parking just about anywhere is a small nightmare. If you can’t read the alphabet, you probably can’t read the instructions on the parking meter. Or the directional signs in the parking deck. Or the ‘no parking’ signs, you know, everywhere. And did you know that in much of the world, people routinely back into parking spaces? ALL parking spaces. More often than not, we can find our rental because it’s the only one parked wrong way around.
Another truly awful dent in one of our rentals happened in Punta Arenas, in Chile. It happened during a particularly intense interaction with a fence post. Later that day, after we had very carefully parked in the tiny little lot tucked next to our hotel, the building on the other side was set on fire. It was a BIG fire. The building was gutted. What were we thinking about, just before we had to evacuate from our hotel? If the car was destroyed in the fire, no one would ever know about the dent. (Just for future reference: the insurance that comes with our credit does NOT cover civil unrest. Be sure to read the fine print.)*
Another fun thing, while I’m randomly listing off fun driving adventures, is navigating. Driving on unfamiliar roads is difficult enough. Add in an unfamiliar car, unfamiliar driving etiquette (yes, it’s different all over the world), and possibly a completely foreign language, and it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. I navigate, Lee drives. Sometimes we yell at each other a little bit. Like, for instance, the time I navigated us smack into the middle of the village market. The PEDESTRIAN market. That was a fun time.
The best, though, was in South Korea, while Lane was visiting us. An indicator light came on, and we thought it meant we were getting a flat tire. So we stopped at several gas stations, trying to figure out how to top off the air. The light wouldn’t go off. So Lee stopped suddenly at a tire shop, and told me to go in (because I have to do all communicating).** Lane pretended to be asleep in the back seat while Lee and I argued. The whole thing seemed futile to me—I speak exactly one word of Korean, and we were in the hinterlands. We went around and around about it, until he suggested I not even try to use words: “ Just make a hissing sound, like a tire.”
At that point, Lane burst out laughing in the back seat, and I stormed out of the car, slamming the door. No, I did not walk up to a bunch of mechanics and make random hissing sounds. And it turned out the light meant one of our headlights was out. Hissing would’ve been irrelevant anyway, even if it hadn’t caused an international incident.
*I wrote about that fire here.
**You should see what happens when we get into a taxi—if there’s a 3rd passenger with us (for instance, Lane, who is entirely complicit in this little harass-mom game), it’s a race to get into the back seat, leaving me to sit with the driver. And that one time in Athens, when the driver hit a scooter, and I was in the front seat, because I always am, yelling scoooter, scooter, scooter! (Which, by the way, is not the Greek word for ‘be careful not to run over that man on the small motorcycle.’) When the driver got out to yell at the scooter driver (who was writhing around on the ground and clearly not dead), we tossed some money on the seat and beat a hasty retreat.
Lee is right. Everything about cars is a pain in the ass.
Take care,
Lisa
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