Thursday, September 22, 2005

A slight run in with the police

One of the latest arrivals from the US is Joe Moeddel, who didn't know how to drive an manual car (which is what they pretty much all are here). Anyway, he arrived yesterday and needed a little help getting home, so I went with him. He actually wasn't doing too bad, until we got to this one road (highway really), where he had to merge into traffic that was moving pretty fast. The major issue was that our road had a stop sign, giving him about 10 meters of space to get his car up to about 70 kph.
Well, I told him to slow down, but not come to a complete stop at the stop sign - otherwise his normal 50 meters of getting out of first gear would have made us all roadkill. He merged onto the road and all was well until the police officer ahead made us pull over. A couple of really bad phrases in french explaining how he was trying to learn to drive stick and showing him our ID, the nice police officer let us go. A couple more stalls later, we finally made it home.
And yes, I drove us both into work today.