Driving: Left turns are now easy

We got a car (I told you), we got car insurance, and we even got optional car insurance (which wasn't so optional since everyone was insisting that we get it).  After all that we still weren't allowed to drive to school yet (Suzuki-san said something about how we wouldn't know how to drive on icy/hilly roads).  Well, I know the roads in Japan aren't salted in the wintertime (since it would ruin the surrounding rice fields) but the roads are often more textured than in the US (especially for sharp curves) and I figure that as long as you go slow you'll get used to it (right?).  The roads haven't been icy yet, meanwhile in Massachusetts there was a freak October snowstorm and Halloween trick-or-treating was postponed in some towns due to power outages.  I hope that I can drive to school soon since I really feel bad about the other teachers driving me (and poor Katou-san doesn't even live in my neighborhood)!

Here's our car, it's about five feet tall.

  Anyway, what you're probably really wondering is how difficult/different it is to drive on the left side for someone who's driven on the right.  The answer is... it's really not that bad at all.  It helps that the steering wheel is on the right side (thus reminding me to be vigilant).  I was probably driving a bit too far to the left side during my first trip but I've improved since then.  It's only confusing when I pull onto an empty road (since I automatically try to stay on the right if I'm not simply following the car in front of me).  In the US I drove a standard transmission (manual) car but our k-car is an automatic and as I predicted I did attempt to shift the car into neutral a few times when going down a hill.  My right hand automatically went out to my right side (where the shifter would be in my US car) and I hit my hand against the driver's side door... haha.  So I learned pretty quickly that there was no need to shift.

Using kilometers per hour (km/hr) instead of miles per hour (mph) also isn't hard since all the speed limit signs (which are circular with a red border) are in km/hr and the k-car's speedometer only measures in km/hr.  As a side note, going 70 km/hr (on the highway) may sound fast, but it's only about 45 mph.  Most speed limits in my area are 30 to 50 km/hr (20 - 35 mph), which is a good thing since most of the roads are much narrower than in my hometown.  Luckily in my neighborhood there are plenty of strategically placed mirrors at the intersections so that I can see if there's a car coming around a corner.

As a final note about driving in Japan I must warn you that stop signs are NOT octagons, they are triangles with the word tomare (stop) on them, so please be careful if you ever go to Japan!