He told me so

We bought a car. After much debate (and a bike ride on which Jeff rode my bike with the boy on the back -- but without the added 20 kilos of groceries we always do), we decided (he was convinced) that there are certain things that you just have to have a car to do. It didn't hurt that our neighbor was selling a beater for a song. I decided to test drive it.

Ah, the test drive.

How did I get elected for this? I know nothing of Dutch road rules. Literally nothing. I had noticed there were no stop signs, like EVER, but I had no idea what the round blue signs with the slashes and "X"es were all about. It's a good thing the neighbor let me in on this little rule of yielding to traffic on the right. Talk about a sea change in the way you process what's going on on the road -- argh! It doesn't matter how fast you're going or how large the road you're on; if someone is approaching on a blind street from the right, you'd better believe they're just going to roar the heck out there in front of you without so much as a glance to their left, that is, in your direction.

So there I was driving my neighbor's car with my neighbor in the front seat as nervous as my mother when I got my learner's permit. Truly, he was so apprehensive I tried to call the whole thing off, but he insisted... and then went on to use the nonexistent brake pedal as we went through our neighborhood, then the nonexistent accelerator as we merged onto the A2. "You have to go faster, FASTER!" he exhorted me while pushing down on my right knee (!) although the pedal in his ancient Golf was already pressed entirely to the floor. I could tell the poor man would have smoked an entire pack simultaneously, Guinness World Record-style, in the ten minutes we were in the car if I hadn't mentioned being asthmatic. Me, I haven't been that nervous driving since I was nine months pregnant the first time.

Sigh.

But we bought the beater. So we are now the proud(ish) owners of a completely impractical, rust-spotted, two-door Golf that is the same model year as my very first car sixteen years ago. Hey, at least there are four wheels and an engine.

Postscript The very, very first time we tried to start the car after we bought it from him, the battery was utterly dead. Even after replacing the battery we were forced to spend the rest of the life of the car carrying around a portable battery/jumpstarter so that when we inevitably stalled out in the middle of the road we could get ourselves started again... since no one would stop and help the first time it happened, but rather preferred to drive around me honking one long, constant honk as if I'd just stopped in the middle of the road to have a picnic on the hood, specifically to inconvenience them. When we attempted to trade it in the following August, a mere ten months after buying it, it was junked. Our neighbor was clearly offended, obviously believing that we were somehow responsible for the Golf's demise and reviling to our faces the new beater of a van we were forced to purchase after its untimely death. "Do you even like that color?" he sneered, "And look at those spots on the bumper where the paint is peeling off; that is just unacceptable," opined the man who had sold us the rust-covered car less than a year before. Indeed.