In Sweden people drive on the right side of the road. Which is to say they drive on the wrong side of the road. As an experienced passenger I know all to well the confusion of striding purposefully towards the left hand door, opening it with flair and finding a wheel and some pedals that shouldn't be there. Having done this 1,704,720,347 times, it is perhaps now my turn to start reciprocating to all those people who have motioned me to the other side of the car and ferried me across the country (or, more often, home from the pub. You tha real MVP).
Today in my first lesson for 10 years it all came back to me; how to find the biting point between the accelerator and clutch, how to shift gear with your left hand, how to position the car in the left hand lane after a turn, how to use the cars on the left hand side to help you position the car and how to always keep going on a main road and don't stop for cars on small side roads. Oh no, wait. That's not AT ALL how you drive here.
First of all my new fangled car doesn't need you to press the accelerator AT ALL to find the biting point, it starts moving by itself when you release the pedal. Then there's the gear shift, obviously that's not AT ALL on the left. As for positioning the car on the left after a turn, don't do that AT ALL unless colliding with large oncoming objects is your kind of fun. And okay, I didn't really struggle with these things, they're mostly for comedy value, but the priority to the right rule (högreregeln)? That's not a thing AT ALL in England.
In England if you're driving on a main road then you've got the right of way. If you're driving on a side road and you approach a main road, then you have to wait for traffic on the main road to stop before you can progress. Simple. But not here. Not everywhere that isn't England apparently. Here you have to have CONSTANT VIGILANCE against pesky cars, trucks, vans, bikes, UFOs, trailers, caravans, camels, horses, husky sleds, snowmobiles and amphibious craft from the right. And a myriad of signs that could potentially tell you to do otherwise.
Besides the troublesome priority-to-the-right rule, the other big obstacle is the language. Sitting in a meeting, lecture, class conversation group or coffee shop and communicating in Swedish is all well and good. Trying to grasp the intricacies of some instructions containing 3 new words that you have to guess from context while simultaneously looking in 3 mirrors, pressing two pedals, manipulating a gearbox and watching for oncoming traffic is an interesting new stretch of my mental multitasking capacity. Many times when something unexpected happened I automatically started speaking in English. Kudos to all those who don't have the luxury of a global language as their default setting and who manage to translate their outbursts to the correct language.
I suppose I'd better get back to learning some things for the theory test (what
should you do if you hit a moose?) and dreading spinning around on the
halkbana, a slippery road mimicking ice that you have to pass a test on. Wish me luck...
