wheels!

It's been a crazy, crazy week thus far, but right now, I couldn't care less. I have a car!

This took endless renegotiations -- not of price, but of time. It was meant to happen Monday morning, then Monday evening, then Tuesday morning, etc... But it has finally happened. Eddie showed up with the car about 9am. He signed the paperwork, and I gave him P20,500 in cash. I think he was a bit shocked by the cash, which was about P17K in P100 notes, and the rest in P50 notes. He also looked horrified when I told him I'd been keeping it in my freezer. Gives a new meaning to the term 'cold, hard cash', doesn't it? I told him this is how Americans do business.

He went over the car with me, paying particular attention to disarming the anti-hijacking alarm. This device, if not properly disarmed, will grind the car to a halt 1 or 2km after it starts, and bells will sound, lights will flash, and all hell with basically break loose. I'm still getting accustomed to driving on the left, and I really do not want hell to break even a bit loose while I'm driving.

The car is a silver 1996 Nissan Sunny, the first four-door I've ever owned. (Hell, it's only the second car I've ever owned, but it's much longer than the little Honda hatchback I've driven in the U.S. for the past eight or nine years.) A mechanically inclined friend-of-a-friend who fixes his own Land Rovers looked it over for me, and gave it a thumbs-up. I think it will need some new CV boots sometime in the near future, but I'm willing to accept that in a ten-year-old car as long as the engine is in good condition.

Eddie and I counted the money together, and then we changed places so I could drop him at Siemens, where he works. He directed me, and I managed the driving well, with the exception of the turn signal (or indicator) and the windshield wipers, which are positioned in the reverse in my Honda. (I'm used to the indicator to the left of the steering column; in the Sunny, it's on the right.) I found myself needing to chant out loud such phrases as, "Stay on the left... Everyone wants you to stay on the left," far less than I did when I rented a car in Jo'burg two years ago. I even took a slightly different way home (albeit by accident). But I got home, and didn't wind up in Kanye or Lobatse or northwestern South Africa. (Remind me sometime to tell the story of how I accidentally wound up in the Free State in 2004.)

It's going to take some self-directed cheerleading, I think, to get me comfortable getting in the car and driving around Gabs. But I do have some errands to run this afternoon and a coffee date with another researcher, and I'm looking forward to getting there under my own power.