Driving

Driving is different here, and not just because you drive on the left instead of the right. The whole inside of the car is also flipped (except for the pedals, thank goodness!). This means that for the first several days, we got in on the wrong side of the car; we flipped on the wipers instead of the turn-indicator; we fought the urge to look over the other shoulder when backing up; we reached to the wrong side for the seatbelt; we smacked our hand into the door when we went to shift. Interestingly, it also meant that more than once, the passenger would reach up to adjust the rear-view mirror so they could see out the back. It’s funny what habits die hard.

Other notes about driving here:
- it's legal for dogs to drive (...OK, not really)

- there are round-abouts everywhere (which is actually really convenient when you need to do a U-turn)

- lane lines are not always clear (i.e. dotted white lines can be used to divide 2 lanes heading the same direction, or they can be used as a centre line for traffic heading opposite directions. If traffic is sparse, it can be hard to tell if you’re on a one-way or two-way road!)

- we don’t need AU or even international licenses – we can just use our regular old US driver’s license (which is actually a bit disappointing)

- sometimes they have these zig-zag lines down the middle of the lane - we don’t know what that means, yet

- speeds, of course, are in km/h, which means speed limits look really high (e.g. 60 in a residential area)

- highways (in Sydney, at least) aren’t always what we think of as highways – many are just big roads. In fact the ‘highway-ish’ highways have only been built in the last several years.