Driving

I am working on getting up some photos of our house, but here is a driving story in the mean time. Today I drove our beast of a car for the first time. There are a few reasons that I haven't driven it before now, mostly because we have been fairly busy, but also because it is huge and a manual, which I'm not used to driving. So when you consider those things and then consider the roads around here, it has been enough to make me want to give up driving altogether. 

Before we left Australia I did do some practising in a manual, but without having a manual car to practise with regularly, I never really gained a lot of confidence in my abilities. But here we are, in Malawi, with a manual car, a big, turbo diesel, manual car, which I need to get used to if I want to gain some independence. 

So today we went for a drive. We chose this afternoon because the roads are a bit quieter on the weekend and with our language lessons Monday to Friday, the weekends give us a bit more time. Ok so I may have only driven about 20km, but during that 20km I avoided hitting any of the 100+ people walking or riding on the road. I also avoided hitting any goats, chickens or other cars, so all in all quite a successful outing I think!

We did get a few weird looks as people saw Ben in the passenger seat, you don't really see a lot of women driving their husbands around. So although I am not quite ready to drive around by myself, I think I am almost looking forward to our next lesson.