Cars and Driving

Another little dose of beauty shop names: Clip Clop and Manish Hair.

We went on a long walk last Saturday. We did about five or six miles. We saw someone driving a white Dodge Ram pickup truck. It was an American car, and he was sitting on the right but driving on the left. My first impression was, "How does he maneuver that thing on these tiny narrow roads?" Then Lee pointed out that he was sitting on the right, but of course, driving on the left. So confusing! And I can't imagine what he must pay for gas. Here's the kind of car we see a lot more often here:

And the two-lane roads are way more narrow than the one-way roads in the US. It's just amazing how people get around so well in so little space. Here are a couple of shots of a road near our home. It's kind of like an access road along a busier road.

There are two things to notice here in addition to the width of the road. 1) the glass wall. These are everywhere here and line both sides of heavily travelled roads. They shut out the noise. We can walk along this road with busy traffic as close as the headlights you see through the glass, and hardly hear the traffic. This road is also interesting in that between the two lanes of traffic, there is another short wall, and down below the road level you can see a steel grated roof. It is the roof of the freeway, which is underground below and between the lanes of traffic at ground level. No sound comes from the freeway to the people living above.

The other thing to notice, if you can see it, is the person in red standing in the street in the photo on the left. She is a service station attendant. After each car is filled with gasoline, she runs out to the street ahead of the car leaving the station, checks to make sure no other traffic is coming, then motions for the car to drive out onto the road. Then she does a deep bow and holds that position for a while so the driver can see her bow in the rear view mirror. How's that for service! It was amazing for us to watch.

And these last two photos are just a peak at the freeways. Once again, the glass lined sides that are usually curved in a little at the top. It cuts down on noise and wind, which is nice. But it also cuts down on view. I have been amazed at how many layers they can do freeways. They spiral up and up, with roads coming onto the spiral and off the spiral. They have toll roads here, too.

I'm hoping I won't have to drive, but Lee is getting better and better. He has really started to adjust to driving on the opposite side of the road. Bro. Oldroyd went everywhere with Dad for the first week—the Post Office, the bank, and some stores. He did a good job of coaching Dad and helping him learn to be very careful. You are seated on the opposite side of the car to drive, so you aren’t used to measuring how far away you are from things on the left, which is now so far away from you. It’s easy to run into a ditch or something else on that side.

And then there are road signs that you can’t read, or no road signs at all. Dad and I walked one morning to a nearby park. We noticed no signs to indicate which street we crossed or even what a person’s address on their home might be. How to find your way around here is still to be discovered by me. Oh, there is a navigation system in the car Dad drives, and apparently it works, but not well. Each missionary companionship has a little “Navi” they carry so they can find where they are going. Of course, it is in Japanese.

We are living and taking walks in an expensive neighborhood, and it's been really interesting to us that all the cars, almost without exception, are always clean. Spotless. And they are nearly all very new. It is just amazing. It seems like everything is clean, for that matter.