Baby You Can Drive My Car

I got the driving licence some three weeks ago.

Let me put it into a context for you. I'm not one of those people who have practiced driving on bylanes since they were teenagers and for whom the driving licence course is just a matter of making things legal. As recently as last summer, quite honestly, I couldn't tell the break from the accelerator. So I started from zero. 

And let me put the other end of the course into a context, too. We have an odd double system in Estonia which means that I had to take two theoretical exams and two driving exams. The way it works is that once you have completed the school's exams (one theoretical, one practical) you can move on to the national ones. I don't know if that's a reasonable system but this is how things are done over here. It also means that when you fail an exam or two, this process can drag on for months on end. I know a colleague who took a whole year to get her driving exams done. I passed all four exams on the first attempt over the course of 3,5 weeks. I started my Christmas break in mid December with the first theoretical test and passed the last one, the national driving exam, one day before my classes resumed in school in January. It's probably not a national record but it can't be too far behind, either. Everything went so fast and so smoothly I could hardly blink an eye and I already had the pink plastic licence in my wallet. 

The penny is yet to drop. To this day I cannot fathom the fact that I could just hop on a car and drive anywhere. I'm still mulling it over. 

The process itself was rather tiring, though. It takes up so much mental energy to attain a new practical skill. The theoretical part I waltzed through because, well, I'm a nerd and that's what nerds do. It takes very little effort for me to sit down and absorb knowledge and pass exams (I think I took a hundred theoretical mock exams while studying, some even on Christmas Eve - home alone, as I was, it helped me pass the time). But to my great dismay, I couldn't just read a book on driving and then drive. I had to learn it the hard way. And the beginning was very slow and painful. I remember distinctly one day in the beginning of October when I walked home from my driving lesson, thinking to myself, "Not everyone could or should drive; maybe I'm just one of those people. There's no shame in that." It sounds funny now but it wasn't funny back then. The other thing that is funny only in retrospect is the way I braced myself for the driving exams. Only 50% of people pass the national driving exam on the first attempt so I was trying to console myself in advance, telling myself that failing these exams is just the normal part of the process. And it's true. But the thing is I've never failed an exam in my life so deep down I knew I would kick my butt and be so terribly melodramatic about it if I were to fail. Ah, I'm such a sissy! But - thanking the heavens above! - I still don't know what it feels like to fail a test. 

Right now, we have this most glorious winter in Tallinn with loads of snow. I really love it but at the same time, it puts my plan to get my first car on hold for a bit. There's no way I would go and plod my way through all that snow. It's safer for everyone if I waited until spring. But once the snow is gone, I'm SO getting myself a car. Actually, K., the sweetest little brother in the world, is helping me buy it. Since he drives an awful old pile of American rust that is almost eaten up by worms, he can't drive it in winter. But he's very fond of his Buick (for reasons totally beyond me lol) so he's getting a second car to drive around during the winter months. And as soon as the weather gets warmer, he gives it to me to drive until next winter. Sounds like a plan to me! So we're all so businesslike these days, sending each other countless car ads, some reasonable, some totally silly. At this point, I have no idea what we will settle on (I want a tiny car, he's into stuff more, uhmm, masculine) but it's fun to banter with each other, and I know I will settle with whatever he wants in the end. 

During the autumn months when I had to motivate myself endlessly to get through the driving course, I had this one specific picture in my head that helped me a lot. It was a picture of myself getting into a car at 4.30 a.m. on a midsummer morning to go to a nearby moor to listen birds sing and watch the sun rise. I'll take my camera and a sandwich and a thermos flask, I'll toast the sun, and be terribly pleased with myself. Deal. :)