As a mother of two - one baby and one toddler - I am always on the wheels: prams, all sorts of strollers, tricycles, what not, and most often, of course, I am using our car.
It´s interesting how we get used to the cars - in a way it becomes our second home - a personal space which we keep clean or fill with all sorts of personal indispensable garbage, a small reflection of our home.
Last week I passed a driving test second time in my life and remembered the cars and experiences I had.
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| On the photo: one of the rare Reykjavik traffic jams in Buðstaðavegur |
My relationships with an automobile started long ago: I got my first driving license in 2000 but actually started to drive my own car only seven years later.
I cannot remember now for what reason whatsoever I decided I needed a driving license in that hot summer fifteen years ago. Still a student, with no perspective of obtaining a moving vehicle of any type or condition at all, I had absolutely no necessity to start learning to drive a car. And despite all the human logic I entered a driving school in June and started the process.
If my memory does not fail me it was the only driving school in
Arkhangelsk at the time (my native city in the North Western Russia). The class comprised about three dozen of men, representing all walks of live and three young women.
They made the school from the remnants of a bankrupt military or paramilitary organisation (I think it was something to do with
DOSAAF ) - the transformation scheme so familiar and rather common for the wild Russian nineties. All of those so-to-say "teachers" were retired colonels and majors in their late fifties-sixties with no experience of actually what can be called teaching. They were loud and disrespectful with the male learners, awkward, uneasy and sweaty with us, pretty and young. And to make it more difficult for them it was a hot summer that year.
Anyway, every Tuesday and Thursday, six to nine, we were there - in a stuffy room with high ceilings of a stalin-time building and dark green walls ornamented with with soviet tanks pictures and posters instructing on five slunk positions of a gas-mask. The walls adorned by the occasional white crater of a dry broken paint, our studies crawled with the snail speed under the monotonous voice of the teacher.
The driving classes were, however, the fun in its essence. I am not joking. My driving instructor was a perl, a find which I have been remembering warmly with a smile for already fifteen years. He was one on those retired as well. In contrast to the classroom shabby guys, mostly political (propaganda) commissars in their past, that one had been a pilot. But... he had a peculiarity uncombinable with piloting - the thing was, let me put it mildly, he often found himself "thirsty". On some days more thirsty than on the others, sometimes even so thirsty that it took weeks to quench the thirst. Understandably, that avocation moved him out of the brave pilots´ regiment, consequently, out of heartbreakers´ cavalry and set him into the driving instructor´s seat.
On quite some occasions I could distinctly smell his last night moral laps in the dilapidated synthetic interior. But what was interesting about him - he talked. He talked nonstop. It was only comparable to the Northern Korean radio (I could only assume) - radio with no music, no commercials - just monotonous talking. For sixty minutes he elaborated on his past, present and his versions of future, he dwelt upon politics, presidents, resurrection of Christ and chicken farms, reincarnation of frogs, of planes, of women. In a way it was amusing. In those days I learned what was a
glide-slope track for the rest of my life.
His working horse, his Sleipnir and my first car was a red
Lada 3. Once bright and attractive with scarlet lipstick, cheap perm in the hair, lots of makeup and rather gaudy outfit, with all her ostentatious looks aiming at attracting sailors and salesmen. That girl became old, alone and forgotten quite fast and then was picked up by my old drunkard, once a fearless pilot and a heartbreaker. If you think of that, they actually made quite a couple, those two.
Lada by large had problems with her health: coughing and rattling sounds of the engine were the least to worry about. The old broad had a hard steering with no hydraulics which I had to put all my weight to make a timely turn. At my first class I was warned that in case the brakes failed, I had to use the hand brake. The transmission lever worked every other time, which to say no more, fell off completely at the exam. Still I passed it. We passed it. Sometimes I wonder what happened with those two.
Seven years later I bought my first car, a
silver Opel Corsa D, and, while expecting it from Germany, called another driving instructor to refresh driving techniques long forgotten by that time.
Sergei was a retired traffic policeman who was unofficially giving driving classes to the needy and then using his contacts in the appropriate institution to help the student to ensure he passed. It required minimum hours of driving and an immoderate gratification.
Having already had driving license I clearly bore no interest for him as a client. Of his interests I cannot say much. I remember the man had a young wife and most of the time he spent of the phone talking to her, continuously questioning her geolocation, where subsequently we would drive to prove her wrong. Apparently the woman was very bad with directions. On some days she would not pick up, and then, after finding some sad rock on the radio in quiet melancholy we would drive to the hardware shop, where he would buy planks of wood, nails, screws, roofing felt and the like. He was building a house.
My Opel became my friend, my company, my girl for the next four years. She was young, honest, hardworking, a bit fancy, compact and fast. I took care of her, she took care of me on all sorts of the roads. In the cold harsh winters she never failed me, starting from half a turn of an ignition key after spending several nights outside in -36C, under the pained watch of the neighbours when their Toyotas and Fords were being taken by the tow-tracks.
Iceland, the country of ice and fire, put me into a dark blue Skoda Octavia station. I mention the colour intentionally as then I was fully sure it was the most boring car colour. I slammed the door and felt my fancy single youth days were over. Quite fast somehow I became a mother of two. In return the car immediately impregnated itself with two baby seats. I cut my hair and filled the wardrobe with colours which hid the traces of burping and dried formula. Suddenly blue did not seem that bad anymore. Again I was in the driver´s seat but on a rather different road - quiet stable middle class life with a big family.
Thinking of that, now I believe this type of a car could have been designed specially for Iceland, an outdoor family country. When we travel with two kids to my in-laws to the North, we take a pram and a stroller, feeding chair, four bags, a suitcase, and a huge pumped gymnastic ball (an indispensable parental item). Packing all that I usually think we would have managed to put a sheep there, provided we had any.
I know I was not perfect driving my Skoda - out of the most outrageous manifestation of stupidity I backed into the pillar at the Rekstravörur - a wholesale warehouse in Reykjavik. And as painful as it was, there was absolutely no necessity to park backwards out of two main reasons: I had never done it before because I could have not been able to (proved myself right though) and I had an intention to buy two huge boxes of stuff and loads of paper towels, which, no doubt, would have been only normal to park the car with an accessible trunk. But no. I pressed gently into the pole, made a dent, broke the paint on the rear bumper and with shaking hands entered the store. It took days, no, weeks to come clean with my husband, but he is a good man.
A month ago I decided to stop my lengthy violation of the Icelandic law and change the driving license. This statement needs an elaboration: as my husband took a woman from
an exotic country outside the boarders of EEA, among other disturbances, her driving license was valid only for 90 days. Apparently, something was expected to happen to those people upon the expiry. Blindness?
Anyway, I took it. It was my second driving test fifteen years after the first one. Everything was different. More to say, everything was the opposite: I took it in the shiny white brand new Mercedes Benz C220 with the 250 kilometers of milage. I don´t know whether it was the composed and calm instructor or the horror of hundred thousands of euro scratch that pushed me through it with no mistakes, but let me tell you, thanks to them finally one thing I learnt very well - parking backwards.
Copyright © 2015 by Olga Johannesson
