Learning to Fly

This isn't the first time I've driven on the left, exactly.  A long time ago a friend of a friend in Liverpool asked me to drive his car home from a night out, as he'd observed me nursing the single pint my narrow pocketbook would allow while he'd had considerably more.  Here's the thing: his car also had a manual transmission.  I BELIEVE, firmly, that I can drive a stick when I'm not behind the wheel of such a vehicle--it's my inherent megalomania coming into play.  This is not a belief that's necessarily based in reality.  My siblings may yet grow a little pale when crossing a certain bit of road where they faced death as I stalled out repeatedly in heavy traffic.  That one night in Liverpool, I did get my friend's friend's car back to his house without major damage.  I'm pretty distractible, in general, and on the road that night I discovered that it's not a good idea to have ANY distractions when you're trying to concentrate on doing something new.  So I'd be puttering along, happily on the right (left), side of the road, and then I'd need to shift and I'd get distracted and I'd suddenly be drifting to the right.  Then I'd get startled, stall out, restart and drive very correctly until I'd hear my passengers talking about something interesting, when I'd drift again, then stall again. Between the constant shuddering stops and starts, weaving, and making unsafely wide left turns, I think we all aged ten extra years on the way.  It was fortunate for all involved that it was about four in the morning and we were the only vehicle on the road.  My sweaty hand finally gave the keys over the the owner's trembling one, and he chortled and said something like, "I guess you were worse off than we thought!" And I laughed along, sober as church, and decided my distractible self should probably never try to drive on the left ever again.  And that's been my opinion for decades, now.

I've only become less attentive with age and with the mass brain-cell-death that came with motherhood.  My children know well that I need them to shush if I'm pulling out into heavy traffic, because I can't listen to their chirping or bickering and pay attention to many lanes of traffic at the same time. So I came to Singapore knowing I would have access to a car but knowing as well that there's great public transportation and taxis are everywhere and cheap.  When I came for my look-see visit last fall, I was struck that drivers here are pretty aggressive, even considering that I'm a Houston driver, myself.  In addition, there are motorcycles everywhere and they love to zip suicidally right through blind spots, weaving in between cars and courting death.  I gave up on the idea of driving then and there, thinking I could never handle both zippy drivers and concentrating enough to stay on the legal side of the road.  I love public transportation, right?  I could totally take trains and busses and taxis for a few years and be thoroughly cosmopolitan and stuff.

But here's the problem:  I love driving.  It's one of my very favorite things.  I spend each spring plotting how I can possibly come up with a good excuse for a summer road trip.  In Houston, I spent three to four hours a day in the car, and while that wasn't ideal, it wasn't terrible either, because I adore coasting along in my giant comfy grandma-sedan, all the horsepower that Tokyo could muster in a hybrid engine waiting to be tapped by a flex of my foot.  I love zipping through drive-thrus on a whim for a coffee or a paper sleeve of tater tots; I love listening to pop music and obnoxious djs and Morning Edition and podcasts as I cover miles of road.  And I cherish the potential that a car and a few dollars gives an individual.  I kind of think it's almost an essentially American idea, that any given afternoon I could set out for Montana if the mood struck me, that I could plan a trip to either coast and chart my route along my nation's arteries and join in the thrumming pulse of her commerce and communication and get to exactly where and who and how I wanted to be.  Driving is freedom, simplified and distilled into action.  I know that's hyper-romantic and silly, but it's also super true. It's as much a part of who I am as my skin is, and realistically, I couldn't just give it up.

Despite my previous experiences and conviction that I'm much too distractible to be able to concentrate adequately on a new side of the road, one day when I needed a zillion things from IKEA, rather than taxi over and recruit the nice taxi uncle to shove obscene quantities of stuff in his trunk, I offered up what I could to the patron saint of lost causes and climbed behind the wheel.  I've driven several times since then: at night, in the rain, during rush hour.  My proportion of panicked moments to mellow moments is heading in the the mellow direction, due as much to a heavy infusion of Phil Collins and Wilson Philips thanks to Malaysian "Light Favorites!" radio as to any improvement in my skills.  I've become more comfortable than I was the first time, and I feel more fully myself tootling around behind the wheel than I do anywhere else here, so don't worry about me.  You could call it a learning process or you could call it a comedy of errors, and it's truly been both.  

You should know my car only speaks Japanese.  That's helpful.

My friend who grew up in Singapore told me that the trick to driving on the other side of the road is just to do the opposite of what you think you're supposed to do, and that has been the most helpful advice in the history of the world.  Other than the gas pedal, everything in the car is wrong.  The turn signal is where the wiper controls are supposed to be.  It's helpful to the other drivers, I think, to see me looking panicked at an intersection, having just turned on my wipers while trying to use my turn signal; they know that I'm an American driver and should be given a wide berth.  

Generally, driving on the left is simple enough: if you think "left kind of turn" when you're turning right and "right kind of turn" when you're turning left you've got like fifty percent of the whole driving thing down. 

Except that I have a confession.  I don't know my right from my left.  Yes, I am well-nigh forty years old, and in reasonably tolerable mental health; but there's something about the concept of right versus left that has never fit into my perception of the world.  I almost always know where North is in a familiar place, sometimes I do in an unfamiliar place, and if I trust my instincts instead of trying to listen to a map app I'm likely to find where I'm going eventually, but if you tell me to turn right you've only got a fifty-fifty shot that I'll turn that way.  Here's what's wrong with my brain--you can make an "L" shape with your finger and thumb, right, and the hand that makes the correct "L" is your Left?  Both hands look like an L to me.  I'd like to think that speaks to a certain mental flexibility.  For our purposes today, let's just be clear that following a traffic app isn't necessarily straightforward for a person who panics every time the app says "Turn..." whatever direction, because it might as well be saying "Turn fnarf" for all the meaning it holds for me.  If I could get the thing to say "Turn North," we'd be in business, but I'm a weirdo and app makers don't program for weirdos, alas.

Instead of reasoning out my turns, I have to rely on instinct; I know that some turns feel very "nope" and some feel more "yay" (because turning across lanes of oncoming traffic is never fun, right?), and I'm reversing my feeling of which are which.  It works.  Lest you be too frightened for me, there are also lots of helpful arrows on the road that I watch avidly, and I generally try to follow a car who seems to be turning the same way I am so that I don't inadvertently drive on the wrong side of the road.  I have yet to drive the wrong direction in a lane (knock wood).  My navigation app has to reroute me a good bit, and I'm glad that my car here makes tighter U-Turns than any car I ever saw in the US, but I'm getting where I'm trying to go.

Unless I have to go through a roundabout.  Then there will be profanity, and possibly backing up on the road in a futile attempt to abort.

In Houston, I gave the Waze app a try to see if it could help me avoid trafficky bits, but I didn't like it because it was always trying to make me do things I didn't want to do.  That app loves to try to make me make unprotected left turns, and dude, I will make a whole block to get to a light so that I don't have to do that.  Waze also likes to avoid big traffic jams by sending you into little ones, and though it may take longer, I like to be moving a little and have the illusion of progress rather than sitting and doing nothing for a shorter time.  So every time I tried to use Waze in Houston I would end up sassing the AI: Waze would say, "In 100 feet, turn left," and I would respond, "That's a terrible idea, you utter nitwit" which at least had the bonus of entertaining my children while we were stuck in traffic.  Here, I need directions everywhere I go so I decided to give Waze another try.  Unfortunately, Waze decided to take the opportunity to try to ruin my life.  

I thought that maybe because Waze's default voice here is a nice lady with a British accent, that maybe she'd be a little more helpful, and I thought that maybe, since I don't have any pre-conceived prejudices about the best routes or ill-fated intersections to be avoided, I could happily go along with whatever she tells me.  Sadly, there have been a few problems.  This is the route I was supposed to take to Ikea that first drive:

And this is the route I took:

Scenic, yes?  I'm not saying for certain that it was Waze's fault, but I will mention that there are TWO directions one can go on the highway there where I got on.  It's certainly possible, and even likely, that Waze told me to go right and I went left, fully confident that I was moving in the direction called "right," whatever that is.  It's also possible Waze told me to take THE exit for the PIE and I took the first one, not realizing, having never been to that interchange before, that there were two.  And then once I was on the highway that nice British voice told me to take the next exit, and I chuckled, thinking, "Silly app.  I know I stay on this road for a long time." And then it told me to take the next exit, and I got a little grouchy and told it to shut up.  And then it told me to take the next exit, and I realized I was nearing Malaysia and was headed the wrong way.  But then I was far enough off track that Waze helpfully re-routed me without making me do a U-turn, so maybe British Lady Waze isn't my nemesis.  Maybe.



It's hard to find where I'm going sometimes because Singaporeans love acronyms like they love delicious chili sauces on everything.  In theory, there's nothing wrong with acronyms; I'm used to numbers, but that's an arbitrary system and I'm not devoted to it, or anything.  I think naming a road the Pan-Island Expressway and then calling it the PIE makes perfect sense.   I'm just never going to learn where I'm going when the directions tell me to take the PIE to the CTE SLE/TPE (KPE).  Seriously, that's a thing that happens.  It's on a sign.  There's another spot on my way to the kids' school that I don't remember exactly because when I try to recall it there's just the roaring of the void in my head.  There's only one response to having to decide quickly while in traffic whether I'm supposed to choose the PIE KPE or PIE CTE when I have zero context for any of those letters, and it's an acronym, too. 

Singaporeans are also thoughtful and take care of their city and have routed tunnels through some areas of town to avoid destroying historic neighborhoods with unsightly overpasses, which is lovely.  Unfortunately, map apps don't work in the tunnels, so when I'm relying on the-app-which-shall-not-be-named to tell me to exit halfway through the tunnel, I'm going to miss that exit.  There's no non-profane way to respond, really, to emerging into daylight at 70 kmh in heavy traffic to hear the infernal"beep boop" rerouting sound and knowing that you've screwed up again and have to cross six lanes of traffic or something to exit and make a series of impossible turns.

I think I would like these apps better, by the way, if they were a little less pleasant.  I usually can't bear exercise videos because the people in them are so encouraging; I don't want to be told "You can do it!" while I'm on my thirtieth push up, I want to be berated so that I'm too embarrassed to stop.  Similarly, I loathe Waze's cheerful little "beep boop" noise--I know I've done something catastrophically wrong and want to hear an appropriate insult so I can have a one-sided fight with the non-sentient AI and feel less chagrined.  A nice "You totally f*&%ed it up again, winner!" would go a long way toward making the inevitable rerouting more bearable.  

I have finally started finding the speed limit signs, but what speed that might be still seems imaginary because I'm American and never really learned the metric system.  I will feel like I'm going a reasonable speed, moving with the flow of traffic, not in the passing lane (which is on the wrong side), when I look down and see that I'm going 90 and freak out a little.  90! How did that happen?!  Then I remember that 90 isn't 90, it's more like 55, so I'm probably ok.  But then I remember that all two of the speed limit signs I have managed to spot, like Jane Goodall hunting gorillas in the thick jungle foliage, say 70, so I should still probably slow down.  I hadn't realized how much of driving is kind of subconscious; some part of my brain knows what 70 miles per hour feels like and can stay there, but no part of my brain knows what 70 kilometers per hour feels like.  I feel like I'm a dangerous granny when I'm putting along slowly and carefully with even little tuk-tuk style maintenance trucks full of workers flying past me, but I'm pretty sure if I drive at a rate that feels normal to me the speed cameras will spot me and send me a ticket and then I'll be deported for breaking the law.

Fortunately, after a long, fraught drive, I get to arrive at a narrow entrance to a subterranean parking lot in which I'll need to back into a parking space.  I think the argument is that because the spaces (confusingly referred to as lots, here) are so small, it's easier to back in so that you can drive straight to get out rather than possibly having to back into traffic.  That seems like circular reasoning to me, but I actually don't mind backing in too much.

I'm saying that badge is the universal symbol for victorious parking.  Boom.

My driver's ed class in high school was taught by a spectacularly scarred former police officer who had been mysteriously injured years ago, presumably on the job, who had no name I remember other than Coach.  He was terse and graphic and practical while lecturing from a squishy chair to protect his injured back, and he was demanding when we finally headed out to the driving course.  The course was a large former parking lot adjacent to the football field, and we each had an old patrol car that we were to drive through the course in a specific way.  He explained the course, which he had designed, and drove it for us as an example.  My only job, on the days I was assigned to practice, was to drive my car through the course over and over until time was up as Coach sat watching in his much newer patrol car, windows rolled up, air conditioning on at such full blast you could see even from afar the thin collar of his polyester shirt flapping in the airstream.  The course was probably pretty standard; four way stops, three point turns, parallel parking.  We drove through it, with Coach watching, and if we made a mistake by knocking over one of Coach's carefully placed traffic cones, Coach would blow the horn on his car.  The offending student was then required to stop his or her car, put it in park, and exit the vehicle.  Then we were expected to apologize, loudly and profusely, to the traffic cone as if it were our own grandmother, until at least three players from the football field stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at the apologizing student.  That was the rule; you weren't finished until three football players were staring at you.  Then coach would sound his horn again, and the student could return to the safely anonymous confines of the car.  Humiliation is a powerful motivator.  We all made very few mistakes on the course.

 For whatever reason, known only to Coach, the centerpiece of his course was a series of traffic cones though which we were to conduct our cars backward in a series of figure eights.  It's the only drivers ed class I ever took; I didn't know backwards figure eights were not standard in drivers ed curricula until I talked to friends years later.  I still have very clear and joyful memories of sailing backwards through those cones on sunny spring afternoons, alone in the dim comfort of a stripped-down old sedan that smelled of cigarette smoke, singing along full voice and with full teenaged heart to Celine Dion's Power of Love and feeling the complete freedom of being in control of a whole vehicle all by myself.  

Once you've done backward figure eights a few thousand times, backing into a parking space is no big deal.  Sometimes, when it's time to park, I get a little flustered because I feel like someone is waiting for me or watching me, and then I have to wiggle a little to get everything lined up.  Other times I am unwatched and free in my vehicle and I slide into a narrow space with grace and it feels like hitting Celine's notes and being as fully myself in this place as in any other.