driving stick, take 4

Before Sunday, I'd attempted to drive stick three times before.

The first time, I was interning in California and a coworker volunteered to teach me. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend and she had chosen the make, model, and color (a pinky-purple shade) of his car, so understandably he was not too fond of it at that moment. I only managed to shift a few times in the company parking lot before getting frustrated and heading to lunch.

The second time, I was in Taipei, and I asked my parents to sign me up for driving school, figuring that since all driving classes in Taiwan are taught using stick shifts, it was a great way to learn. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that my limited Chinese vocabulary did not include the words for "clutch", "accelerator", and other important terms, so the instructor thought I was retarded and overall the lesson went quite badly.

The third time, I was in France. We had a rental car which was a stick shift, and I figured I could pick it up as we went along. Unfortunately the people in the back seat got a little nervous about the idea after I accidentally got into reverse in the parking lot, and I was quickly relieved of driving duty.

On Sunday, I coerced a friend who recently inherited a new BMW into teaching me (and two other friends) on his old Jetta. Due to some combination of circumstances (maybe he was just a better teacher, or maybe the car was easier to drive, or maybe it was less pressure to have three people learning at once), we all managed to do respectably well. We drove around in circles on Oracle Parkway for nearly two hours, stopping at stop signs and shifting up and down gears, before yielding the driver's seat in order to head home (I live on a pretty big hill).

Anyway, I'm pretty psyched right now about the whole driving stick thing, but we'll see if it lasts.