Always look on the left side of life...

I just picked up the rental car for this weekend. Fellow interns and I plan to go the St. George's Festival on Sunday and since English rental companies are closed on this day, we needed to rent the car for the whole weekend (which for the four of us is still cheaper than taking a bus). So what we are going to do today is to visit Sutton Hoo and maybe Bury St. Edmunds - expect some pics in the next posts. :)

Of course renting a car in England isn't without its bureaucratic problems. The company was only 2 miles away from home, so I walked there this morning. Again, I needed two forms of identification, now with the additional requirement that at least one of them stated my UK address of residence. ID #1 of course is my passport, but how can I prove my residency since there is no such thing as the requirement to register yourself locally? In the end I had to go back to my house and get a letter from Barclays I got last week. As there was my address on it, this counted as a proof. But the rental guys were very nice and understanding and instead of letting me walk the 4 miles back and forth, they even drove me home to get the letter. Anyway, in the future I will have it with me all the time, just in case.

The next hurdle was that those guys also would like to have two telephone numbers and they were not willing to accept my German mobile number as one of them. :( Fortunately, I had received an email from a fellow intern yesterday stating his mobile number and in the end the guys were happy with only this one as well. So now I was finally able to hit the road and experience the wonders of driving a car on the wrong (sic!) side of the road.

After driving about 10 miles from the car company to my Microsoft office (in between only getting lost once), I come to the conclusion that the problem is not to keep the car on the left side. At least inside the city this is very easy, because you just need to stay behind the car in front of you. Also, the problem is not to shift gears with your left hand because even this is quite natural, because gears have the same position as on the continent and I got used to the left-hand thing within minutes. The real problem driving a car is that as a continental European you have the natural expectation that there is the rest of the car to your right and the window to the left. Now in the UK it's vice versa and I felt extremely narrowed on my right side, because I just don't have enough space for my arm. Still after having left the car for 30 minutes now, I feel this unnatural feeling of having a door to my right. Veeery strange...