Feb. 5 : This is wrong but it feels so right...

(a photo from our walk today)

The flight over the pacific was 13 hours, plus 1 hour sitting on the Tarmac in SF.

funny little something we saw in SF:

We ate dinner in the international terminal at a Japanese restaurant while waiting for our flight. Sitting adjacent to us at the sushi bar was a couple and their young boy. The young boy was about 3 or 4 years old, and he was being a pretty good little kid. He was obviously excited about flying: making airplane noises and swooping his chopsticks around like a plane. So at one point we heard the father ask the boy "You liked the green ones didn't you ?" The kid nodded his head, so the father ordered some avocado rolls from the chef. The restaurant wasn't too busy, so he made them right away and handed them over the bar to the father, who put the little tray in front of his son and resumed talking with his wife. The kid started gobbling up the avocado rolls, when he made a mistake he will not soon forget. He did something very understandable for a 3 or 4 year old, and something even some adults have done before... he mistook the large wad of wasabi on the tray for a large wad of avocado, and popped the whole thing in his mouth... His mom saw it going into his mouth, but was too late to react. There was the cruel 3 second delay that strong wasabi has before it hits really hard, and then the child started bawling, he spit out the wasabi. His parents tried to give him milk, but he coughed and spewed it out all over the sushi bar, I'm pretty sure some came out his nose. He was crying and they were doing all they could to calm him down. It took a while but he finally came back down to earth. But I don't think he finished the avocado rolls...

Anyway, we made it over the Pacific. I was able to get about 5 hours of sleep, which is better than I expected. When we landed it was 5:30am. We made it through customs with no issues, rented a SIM card for the mobile phone lent to us by a friend, and boarded the bus to go pick up a rental car. I jokingly asked the rental car guys if they had a test track for people driving on the left for the first time. He chuckled. But let me tell you guys, driving on the left is NO JOKE. It's not just "driving around in the other lane", oh no. Everything you have learned gets switched around in this bizare mirror world. All of your instincts, the little things that are automatic while driving, are absolutely wrong. If anything you are do while driving feels like you are doing it right, then you are doing it wrong. And if you are doing something right, it feels SO Wrong.

I never realized how much of the things we are proficient at rely upon our ability to predict how things will behave. For instance, when I am mountain biking a lot, I know exactly and instinctively how my bike will react to a given steering input, or body lean, or brake tap. Part of riding well relies on an unconscious model of how all of the variables behave, bike, trail surface, tires, etc. You can only develop this model by riding the same bike for hours and hours. When something changes on your bike, even as small as a 1 cm shortening of the stem, changes the steering speed very slightly, but it will cause me to be ricocheting off every tree in the forest, until I adapt the model to incorporate the new stem length. It's not a conscious effort, it just happens over time.

Now think about driving, and how many little things you don't even know you know, and how they relate to driving on the side of the road you have always driven on. And how much of driving reactions depend on your ability to predict what the other drivers on the road are all going to do. I'll give you one subtle one as an example. Imagine you are driving along a road and a car approaches from a side road on your right. You see, as you glance at the car, that the driver has his left turn signal on, going to turn left onto the road you are on. As he approaches the intersection, he slows a little and begins pull out and make the left turn as if he didn't even see you coming. OH NO HE'S GOING TO HIT YOU!!! But in NZ when this happens it's all OK, because he's turning left, into the left hand lane, and doesn't have to cross your path. There's lots of little ones like this that give you minor CI's until you get used to it.

Also every time I signal for a turn, I flip on the windshield wipers. This is because the turn signal and wipers are swapped. It's strange to look up and to the left to glance in the rear view mirror. Also looking down and to the right for the side view is strange. Shifting from Park to Drive is done with the left hand... DUH. All these little things add up, and it's really wierd.

Anyway... So I drive really slowly and carefully, and take my time and eventually get to the hotel. It's kinda fun trying to rewarp your brain to drive well...

SO We made it to the hotel (2.5 hour drive) took a 20 min nap, and then and went for a walk around. We went to Mount Mauao and walked along the beach. The photo is from our walk.