another busy day
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today we set off right away for Fuchu, a city adjacent to Kokubunji. Mari needed to tell The Man that she'd moved, and I was completing the creation of my Japanese driver's license by converting my Ontario license. The building in which this was done was three stories of fun, fun, fun. I visited seven different windows, took an "eye exam", bumbled about in Japanese, and briefly thought I'd lost our son's water bottle.
Then it was off to Costco and it was okay until it was time to leave. It took us thirty minutes to leave the three-story parking lot*.
Then we were back to the driver's license palace where to my surprise there were a bunch of cops in the parking lot surrounding a car in which the driver's door was open but the driver's seat empty, and someone sitting in the passenger side who remained on the phone the entire time we were in the building. The lead cop looked incredibly unhappy, as perhaps only Japanese policemen can. I have no idea what the story was of course but all in all, thirty minutes of moving zero meters an hour with the engine off and meat thawing in the trunk suddenly looked less bad.
Then it was home to simultaneously return the car (Mari) and put away the groceries (me) and then go meet The Girl at the end of her first day (ever) of day care.
And so it was that Mari's last day before returning to the work force ended.
*As we finally got to the exit ramp, I told the fellow who was conducting traffic, "Thank you very much!" He nodded. I added, "We waited thirty minutes!" Mari said he likely felt I was criticizing him. I didn't know enough gluing grammar to work in that my gratitude was genuine because of the wait. Bonus: I'm sure it's occurred to some who read this that I might have gotten out of the car prior to that thirty minutes expiring to see what was up. I did in fact do this - at Mari's suggestion - and discovered that the problem lay in the way that there were multiple ways of exiting the second storey. The Japanese are generally speaking good drivers and they tend to drive sensible cars and the roads are generally good (if narrow and prone to ending in frustrating ways). But toss in a bit of ambiguity about where one is supposed to drive and all hell breaks loose.