Sunday, February 25, 2007

Driving in England

Ok, now I am sitting at the airport departure hall. Lay back, relax and have a sip of good coffee. Got to think what could be the gift for my daughter from not-many-options duty free area. It is hard to believe that I have done a driving on the left hand of the road with a manual car for a week. Initial, this seems like something scaring but turned out ok. last time I did this was 7 years ago and I was driving a auto car, which reduced the complexity significantly.
The first challenge is in parking lot. that is the place I continuously lose conscious about that I have to drive on the left side of the road. and that is the place you can see the face of astonished driver front of you. Sort of embarrassed. I think the thing bothering me most is still the roundabout. it seems a mechanism that has a lot of subtle rules built in it. the first time I drove into a roundabout, I got honked. Later, I guess I managed better since I did not get into more troubles. However, if you ask me how to drive through a roundabount in detail? sorry, I just cannot tell. I will say roundabout is a smart design. it works very well when there are not many cars running around. When traffic is getting higher, it seems everyone then has to follow all these subtle rules or it will collapse, and things get slow down significantly.
Pump station and car return upset me a little, they have to come into the shop to pay and there is always a long queue there. But I guess that is normal for europeans since I got the same things in Germany.
I avoided driving in big city, since I know it is not going to be managerial. And it was strongly adviced by friends because of recent change of traffic rules in London. The high traffic area fee is definitely a hot debatable topic. Well, got to go back to air travel and normal right hand side driving soon. I guess surviving for one week is good enough and probably the maximum :D

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