Turkish roads, here I come

After a good year of having to think about it, today I completed my hoop-jumping en route to a Turkish driver's license by taking the actual driving test (as opposed to the written test, which I took a couple of weeks ago... you remember). Sit back with some popcorn, here's the story.

I had to get up nice and early for the test – they schedule it early on a Sunday morning so that they can find a road with little or no traffic on which to test aspiring drivers. So when my alarm clock went off, interrupting a particularly interesting dream, I got up, ate my toast and cereal, and went outside to find a taxi. Easy enough, as there's a taxi stand around the corner from our apartment. I told the driver to take me to "the Üsküdar pier," Üsküdar being the neighborhood on the Asian side where the driving school is located. Well, it seems there's also a pier on this side of the Bosphorus which you refer to as "the Üsküdar pier" because that's where the boats which leave from it go, and my driver blithely took me there instead of over the bridge. Imagine my surprise when we stopped on the wrong side of the water! After I made it clear that we were NOT where I had asked to go, we hurried along to the proper destination. I was a little time-conscious, so the adrenaline rush made a nice substitute for the coffee I hadn't made myself.

Anyway, I made it to the driving school where I and a bunch of nervous-looking teenagers (and a middle-aged woman or two) sat around waiting for the shuttle bus to take us to the neighborhood where the driving test would be carried out. As we sat brooding, a kid across from me started telling his girlfriend that this whole driving-test thing was just a scam to make money, and that in America you just show up at some office and say "I want a driver's license," whereupon they just put you in a car, let you show your stuff, and then give you a license in exchange for ten bucks. Hah! I never cease to be amazed at the naïve vision of free-and-easy American life that obtains in certain places (nor at how said vision manages to coexist with anti-Americanism, but that's another story).

Finally the shuttle buses came, and we got shuttled off to a road called "NATO Street" which has a long straightaway. Our mission, according to the guy from the driving school who accompanied us in the shuttle, was to drive a ways, make a U-turn, drive some more, make another U-turn, and come back to where we started. (To the chagrin of those who believe in omens, we passed a "Student Driver" car which had been rear-ended by some jackass in an SUV and whose poor driver was talking to the police as we passed.) We got out at a given spot on the road across from a Domino's Pizza; there were a couple other, similar groups at various points along the road, all equally nervous. Anyway, one of the guys organizing the whole event told me to walk about fifty yards up the road to a bus stop, where the present examinee would stop the car and let me get in for my turn, as indeed she did. When the car pulled up, I got in and showed my exam ID, upon which the examiners sitting in the back seat said "OK, let's go." I set off, got in the left lane in anticipation of the U-turn – and the examiners said, "All right, pull over to the right" (i.e. to where the group from our school was waiting). I looked at them, puzzled, and they said I clearly knew what I was doing, so the test was over. Hence my driving test took all of fifty yards and ten-ish seconds. Whee!

With that ordeal out of the way, I had the rest of the day to myself. This I spent engaging in my favorite pastime: Wandering around in bookstores, wondering if I should buy anything. In fact I did, by way of celebrating my passage to vehicular manhood. I also went to the movies and saw The Dark Knight, which was a big fat disappointment, although I shan't bore you with a detailed aesthetic analysis of that unholy mess. Now I'm sitting at home, recording my day's fun for your enjoyment. Don't worry, Meltem and Ozan are coming back next weekend, at which point I'll be able to post some of the pictures and video taken of His Majesty at his summer retreat (I know you only read MelbaBlog to hear about him anyway!).