The JET interview process forced me to do some reminiscing about my former travels abroad. I spend four and a half months abroad in 2007 in Dunedin, New Zealand and I rarely have talked about it to my friends until recently. Obviously no one understands what your experience is like, but I feel like being removed from it for a couple of years now has made me realize what I learned and how crazy some of the things I did were. Until I have new adventures, I am going to tell you about some of my old.
One thing I failed to understand before New Zealand was that old cars in the US don’t just get destroyed when owners are done with them. Oh no, that would be wasteful. They are exported to other countries, fixed up, and used for many more years. Never mind the black clouds of exhaust, these cars run until the wheels fall off.
Upon arriving in New Zealand, I was surprised to discover that the most cost efficient way to travel is to buy a car. My intimidated self did not think I was capable of driving on the other side of the car and road, so I dismissed this idea. Until I looked up bus fares.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve car shopped in a foreign country. Okay, that’s not true, but it is a unique experience. The first approach I took with a couple of friends was to buy a car directly from an owner. This seemed like the safer and more logical choice. My friend Elena and I found a flyer for a Chevy Pajero for sale and we decided to check it out. The owner lived at the top of a giant hill on the other end of town. We spent an hour walking uphill and met the owner, Mao. He introduced us to the car (which we also nicknamed Mao). This car was HUGE.
Elena drove it around the block and fell in love with this car. Being the level-headed one of this duo, I convinced her it was gas guzzling and completely impractical. It ran on diesel for goodness sake! Not to mention how wide the car was and we already had to get used to driving on the other side of the road. She became obsessed, however. Finally, I refused to go in on it and so did the other 2 in our group.
The shopping continued. Elena dropped out of our car group and went in on a car from 1988 that didn’t have power steering. Nikunj, Katie, and I continued on in search of our dream car. Next, I found a man named Colin, who sells cars for a living mainly to stupid Americans. Colin was a nice man and he really knew how to sell cars. I could only drive an automatic, so the options were fairly limited as to what he could sell us. He brought a car over to me that I had to test drive. I didn’t want to test it without my friends, but they weren’t around and he wanted to sell it right away since there are lots of stupid Americans that can’t drive a stick like me. It was a 1992 Toyota Corona (like the beer) with a hatchback. I got behind the wheel and realized I’ve been living in the wrong place my whole life! The other side of the car means that the shifter is on the left side and I’m left-handed. This was meant to be. The trick to driving on the other side of the car is to hug the center. Always always hug the center. The tendency is to think you are on the left side of the car and drift right. The car drove to my satisfaction and I verbally agreed pending my friends were okay with it. They were okay with it relieved that Mao was out of the picture and we purchased the car.
One thing we could have never known test driving it around the block was that when this car goes about 50-60 mph, it smokes. Not just a little, it blows smoke out the exhaust pipe like you wouldn’t believe. The first time this happened was when we were driving it up a large hill. The car wouldn’t give all it could when this smoke happened, so it was scary because we thought it was going to die. We pulled over wondering what on earth we should do. We ended up just waiting for a while and then getting back in and continuing on. Often times, we would get out and look at the car engine to see if there was anything we knew how to do. But, we never did.
We called Colin and told him about this little smoke issue and he agreed to get it fixed for us. The lovely thing about countries outside the US is that people won’t just give you the finger. They are obligated for the first couple of weeks to fix something that doesn’t work as promised. We ended up getting a whole new engine, however, by whole new I mean whole new very used. That did help the severity of the smoke problem, but didn’t fix it.
We had to sell this car at the end of our stay. We posted fliers everywhere and finally got a bite from a fellow student. We accidentally let it slip that we called the car Smokey, but claimed it was because of the color. I’m confident when he sells it, he’ll do the same.
