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In adapting to England over the last several weeks, I would say that the culture does not feel foreign, so much as different.  It’s like seeing something odd out of the corner of my  eye; I shift my perception to take it in more completely, and spend a little more time processing it, but what originally caught my attention does not seem so strange as it did at first glance.  What wears me down is the sheer number of times I have to stop and process the new and somewhat different information, and attempt to relate it to what I already know.

Traffic roundabout, in London (where fortunately I never had to drive!)

The signs are in English, although the English is often not quite the same usage as what I would anticipate.  The street signs are strange but generally understandable, after a few moments observation of the traffic and the area.  The food often has funny or incomprehensible names but usually tastes good, although not quite like anything I’ve ever had at home, either.  The coins look odd and sound funny when clinking together in my pocket (and the denominations are slightly different as well) but they work as coins ought to when I need to use them.  The accents of the people I pass by on the street often render their speech incomprehensible, but if I end up chatting with those same people, eventually something clicks in my brain and the words fall together (albeit usually not until after an embarrassing pause whilst my brain furiously processes the shift in pronunciation and the slightly different grammar and usage).  On top of this is my knowledge that most of these people have no problem understanding me, because they have been watching American films and TV shows their whole lives and have no problems at all understanding an American accent and American English usage.  Brits do like Americans, though, so any problems I have understanding them usually injects a bit of humor in an otherwise awkward situation (as long as I am polite about it, of course).  This is why I stated in my previous letter that I have not been unhappy here, simply overwhelmed.  I have met so many nice people and when I am willing to express my confusion, they are always willing to help me clear it up.  The only times I do not try to clear things up are when I am already at my limit and feel that I can no longer take in new information.

Road sign in Little Barrington, UK

Ah, the wisdom of maturity.  Only a few years ago, I would have been constantly berating myself for not understanding everything instantly.  Something that a constantly changing military lifestyle has taught me, though, is patience with myself and a better understanding of my learning curve and my limits.  I am confident, now, that I will learn what I need to learn eventually, and I am willing to grant myself the time to learn it (usually).

For those of you who received my Australia trip e-mails, you may recall that I mentioned that Australia felt less foreign than Hawaii.  Modern Hawaiian culture has such a strong Asian and Pacific cultural influence that Hawaii often appears to feel more like a foreign country than a U.S. state.  So I must admit that when I say that England does not feel really foreign, I am again comparing it to my experience in Hawaii.  Mainstream American culture often feels closer to English culture than it does to Hawaiian culture.  I would like to emphasize, though, that I don’t consider this to be either a good or bad situation; I truly enjoyed my experience in Hawaii, and the strong Asian influence simply made it more interesting.  I’m just commenting on the differences between the cultures.

Well, enough philosophizing!  Onward to the specific bits…

London street, near Big Ben (in the background)

Of course, no discussion of the differences between our two cultures would be complete without mentioning the traffic.  I have had a truly difficult time learning that the British drive on the left… and I am only referring to my experiences as a pedestrian!  This IS foreign, no doubt about it.  I have crossed more busy streets here in the last several weeks than I have in the last several years, and every time, it is a challenge for me to remember which lane contains traffic going in which direction.  It is as if I learned American traffic patterns in infancy, when I can’t even remember learning them, and now I cannot unlearn them, or at least adapt them to these new conditions.  My car will be arriving soon.  My American friends here tell me that it really isn’t too difficult learning to drive on the left side of the road, that you just follow the cars in front of you and you usually do okay.  I do suspect that once I have been driving for a while, that will help me learn the drive-on-the-left traffic patterns much better than just being a pedestrian.

Park Place (road leading to my flat, at The Park, in Cheltenham, UK)

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I had an awesome time in England.  I met many wonderful people, both at work and outside of it, especially in my A Course in Miracles study group.  I eventually adapted quite well and took the opportunity to travel both locally and further afield, to Scotland and the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and on continental Europe (which I mentioned in an earlier post about driving through the Alps).  On the one hand, I wish I’d been able to stay longer in England (I was originally supposed to be there for 3 years, but was there only 1 year).  On the other hand, a few months after I arrived back in Quincy, I met my future husband.  Well … I guess it was a good trade. 

Lucy with her shades on, and Hawaii flag on sunroof

But … in late 2002 I started seeing these adorable little cars running around the island of Oahu, where I lived at the time, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were the new MINI Coopers, and they filled my eyes and tugged at my heart like a little glimpse of fun car heaven. After several months of war between common sense and a desire I didn’t even really understand, I logged onto the MINIUSA website, and started doing some serious research. I picked out the colors and the features that I wanted, and headed down to the dealership, determined to get only what I wanted, and to get my money’s worth. I even took a male friend with me for moral support and so I would be taken more seriously by those slippery car salesmen.

This great plan went almost straight out the window. Getting exactly what I wanted would take six months at least, because the car would have to be ordered from the factory in England, and I wanted a MINI Cooper NOW. So I did something even more crazy … I picked a car available on the lot, loaded with a ton of features, about half of which I didn’t want, and I paid MSRP for all of it – $27,000. It amazes me even now when I think about it, that I did all this. I realize now that some part of me knew it would be worth it.

Lucy is so much fun to drive! Street driving felt grossly inadequate, once I started to understand what Lucy could do, especially on corners. I joined the BMW Car Club of Hawaii (BMW is the parent company of MINI) and took some BMW driving courses, raced in a few autocrosses, met a lot of great people, and for the first time in my many years in Hawaii, really started enjoying myself. What a ride!

Lucy after her 2 laps on the Nurburgring, June 2005

I transferred to England in October 2004, and took Lucy with me. I drove Lucy in several parts of England, including Wales, Scotland, the Shetland and Orkney islands, and the Cotswolds. I also took part in a road rally with several English MINI Cooper owners and some guy with a Porsche 911 – we rode a train through the Chunnel and drove through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Monaco, all in a week’s time.

Some of the most exciting and stressful driving was through the Alps. What follows is my description of driving through the Alps, and particularly Passo Dello Stelvio, a mountain road over a 9,000 foot pass through the Italian Alps that has been described as one of the most dangerous roads in the world.

I didn’t get enough sleep the night before driving the Alps. And I am afraid of heights. So I spent the whole day driving over Swiss and Italian mountain passes – Grimsel, Furka, and others I don’t recall – in a state of fear, which was aggravated by sleep deprivation and the altitude headache I had awoken with that morning in Interlaken, Switzerland. This was by far the most challenging and exciting day of driving during our entire trip, but I was not driven by enthusiasm; rather, I simply pressed forward with a grim determination to just get it over with. Every succeeding mountain pass that day presented me with a greater endurance challenge, both physical and psychological. I simply felt I could do no more by 10:00 p.m., when we finished our 45 minute ascent of Italy’s infamous Stelvio Pass – 45 minutes of driving up, up, up, constantly switching between first and second gear through an endless series of hairpin turns and occasional patches of thick white clouds, in a deepening twilight on unlit narrow mountain roads, and we still had a descent of unknown length to drive on the other side before reaching the relative safety of an Italian motorway.

Stelvio Pass is not for the faint of heart, or the ill-prepared. It is not for people with suicidal tendencies, or even low self-esteem. It is not for people driving cars with bad brakes or no power steering. It is not for people, like me that night, who are too tired to see straight, or who didn’t get enough sleep the night before. And most of all, it is not for people who are afraid of heights! Every hairpin turn presents the driver with another aspect of the infinite abyss, sheer mountainsides and distant snow-covered crags, and the sure knowledge that a mistake would likely be spectacularly fatal. The bollards on the side of the road are there to show a driver where the cliff edge is, not to keep them from falling down the mountain if their hands slip off the wheel or their foot off the brake pedal. No room exists on those narrow roads for such a reassuring safety feature as an adequate crash barrier. There is virtually no room for error. The width of these mountain roads, while technically wide enough for two cars, usually appears about one-and-a-half cars wide, which makes passing by an oncoming car or tour bus a heart-stopping experience, even in a MINI.

The dark side of Passo dello Stelvio (well, it was dark when I drove it!)

Standing at the top of Stelvio after the eternal nerve-wracking ascent, where the temperature was in the mid-30s F (50 degrees colder than the warm June air we had left behind several thousand feet below) I shivered with cold and exhaustion and an overwhelming dread of the descent. The handful of hotels and restaurants at the top of the pass, with their garish neon signs and warm reassurance of human presence and shelter, seemed jarringly out of place in such a cold, remote area (and how on earth did they get all that construction material up there to build hotels and restaurants? And keep them supplied? Surely not via those terrifying roads!). Everyone else in my group took pictures and talked enthusiastically about how much fun the ascent had been. I desperately and irrationally wished I wouldn’t have to drive down the mountain, and entertained the thought of checking into one of the hotels. I was almost paralyzed with fear. I knew that staying would only delay the inevitable, though; I had to get myself and Lucy off this mountain, and I knew I was the only one who could do it. I had to almost literally push myself out of my state of paralysis, to get in my car and prepare to drive it down that terrifying mountain. After waiting what felt like forever (15-20 minutes), everyone else finally got back in their cars, switched on their headlights … and we all drove down the dark side of the mountain.

The descent, which took about 45 minutes, was frightening, but fortunately somewhat less so than the ascent. We again spun around and around the endless hairpin turns, catching brief glimpses of the abyss, which now was merely a vast yawning blackness – still disturbing, but somewhat less distracting than catching brief dizzying glimpses of far off mountainsides. I spent most of the drive down switching between second and third gears (second for the turns, third for the occasional almost-long straightaway). We met no other cars until well past the last hairpin turn, when we reached some decent, respectable roads that were not hanging off the side of a cliff. The air thickened and warmed, and my altitude headache finally went away. Even via the respectable roads, though, and moving at a good pace, Bolzano was still over an hour’s drive after the end of Stelvio; we didn’t reach our hotel until 12:30 a.m. It was one of the most opulent hotels we stayed in during the entire trip, and the one in which we spent the least time.

I must tell you here – in spite of my fear, one thing I never worried about was Lucy. I never doubted for a moment that she could handle the mountain driving – the altitude and the innumerable 180 degree turns and the steep grades – with ease. It is this sort of driving that MINIs are obviously made for, which becomes apparent after only a few minutes of demanding driving. It’s as if the BMW engineers put four wheels and an engine on a mountain goat. This was my one source of comfort all throughout that long extremely demanding day, and it was why I fell in love with Lucy all over again. She is simply an amazing car. To go from the demands of the Nurburgring and the autobahn one day, to the extremes of mountain driving the next, and to do it all with the same purr in her engine and muscular, precise handling was proof enough that I own a really cool car.

Looking down the mountain