Shaking Things Up

No matter how big of a transition you go through in life, at some point things begin to seem normal.  After packing up and moving to Japan, it only took four months for things to begin to feel settled.  I thought I was finding a nice routine.  I felt confident I could handle daily situations.

Then I got pulled over by the police.  It was after ten o'clock at night.  I was driving home from a nearby town.  I saw police lights on the bridge and figured there must be an accident.  Nope.  It was a random checkpoint.  The police minivan was parked in the middle lane of the bridge and six police with glow in the dark wands waved me down.

I pulled into the center lane.  A policeman came to my window and started asking me questions.  In Japanese.  In very, very fast Japanese.  I gave him my Foreigner Registration Card and American  driver's license.  Then I remembered my International Drivers Permit and gave that to him as well.

There is a very interesting, and very silly flaw in International Driver's Permits.  On the front, in minuscule letters, it says "This International Driver's Permit is valid from:"  Underneath that line, the date that you paid for the permit is hand written in.  You might be wondering how this is a flaw.  Let's role play.

You are an English speaking policeman and you pull over a Chinese person.  You don't speak a word of Chinese.  The Chinese man doesn't speak much English.  He hands you his permit, written all in Chinese.  You can make out the numbers in a familiar format 2/10/2010.  That looks like February tenth, 2010.  It is now August.  That International Driver's Permit looks expired.

Yeah, that's what happened.  Thankfully, I remembered how to say "From such-and-such date to such-and-such date" and tried to explain.  It at least prompted the second policeman (who came up because things were taking too long with me) to go get a dictionary.

After an agonizing 15 minutes of trying to understand Japanese for me, and an agonizing 15 minutes of trying to communicate with a foreigner for the policeman, he decided to let me go.

If you ever travel abroad it is absolutely worth driving legally.  I don't suggest trying to get by without a license or permit.  If I had done anything wrong, I can't imagine how things would've turned out.

Sometimes things begin to seem familiar.  Life has a way of shaking things up.