Finally, I am now doing something which was rather unthinkable a couple of months back: driving my own car in Cambridge. I had to hurdle two main obstacles to achieve this. First was to justify my so-called need for a car. With our residence close to the city center, the university and Aya’s primary school, we really don’t need a car. On weekdays, that is. Weekend after weekend found me wanting to have a car so we can at least go somewhere farther than a 1-kilometer radius from our house. It’s great that I can just order my groceries online and have them delivered at home, but call me old-fashioned or whatever, I admit that I did miss the "joys" of going to the store and picking up whatever I wanted off the shelves. You know that feeling? Just go and grab something you want. If the veggies don’t look as fresh as you want them, throw them back in and grab something else. You can pinch and grope and inspect products at your whim, after all, you’re the almighty consumer! You feel like you’re in control of your shopping. It’s just different when you look at products online. And besides, what better reason is there than the fact that I do have a little girl with me, and I couldn’t just drag her across town to get groceries in close to zero degree weather! And let me not remind you about the rain in Britain!
The second hurdle was to actually find a car, one that is reasonably within my means and one that satisfies my criteria. I didn’t want to drive a manual-transmission type, so I looked around for automatic-transmission type cars. It took a while, but I finally found one. And I actually got a rather good deal: it even came with a GPS navigation system (or simply, sat-nav). So I just gotta have it! 😀 Of course, I didn’t drive the car all at once using the sat-nav (excited as I was). First I had to rely on a very good friend to help me figure out the roads during a joy-ride around town. 😉
But before driving is the teeny-weeny step of acquiring the car. Well, to my surprise, I found out that it was relatively hassle-free to acquire a car here in the UK, compared to that in Japan.
But now, having recently received the official notice for school admission (see image on the left) from the city government (schools are assigned based on residence), we are back to facing the same dilemma. Akala niyo nakaligtas na kayo! After all, we won’t be staying in Cambridge forever, and surely by next year we will be back in Japan. Of course, we are not forced to put our child in the assigned school, but if we do give our consent, all we have to do is return back the card with our details and personal stamp (hanko). If not, then we’ll have to tick one of the boxes at the bottom to explain our reasons/circumstances why we refuse to do so.