Driving round and round and round

Brasilia was built for around 500,000 inhabitants (never mind that there are close to 3 million in the metropolitan area now) and, in the 1960s, was a city of the future. That is to say, a city built with the car in mind. Visionary planners plotted out a city with virtually no stop lights or left turns. Instead, there are looped-de-loops galore with cloverleafs that foil new drivers to the city. Struggling to figure out which lane I need to be transitioning to and when to turn to get turned in the right direction, I am regularly sighted twisting through intersections. On my first trip to work, I impressively missed my exit and looped through an intersection six times before getting set in the right direction. The challenges of a newcomer navigating this city can be well understood.

Post #60: The Mirage

Brasília is a planned city shaped with two wings coming off of a central axis. Many say that it looks like an airplane. It was intended a city of the future and has many pieces of modernist architecture as well as wide, impressive avenues and a central mall with government buildings that extends from the tail to the nose of the plane.

It is also a city that was designed for cars. Crosswalks are often an after-thought, even in pedestrian zones, and they are located many times a large distance from the actual interchange. Brasília, you see, was designed with few to no traffic lights, so there are circles that regulate turns and the flow of traffic. This makes walking around tricky but there are a lot of worn foot-paths showing that human traffic will be governed by the shortest distance between two places rather than along long, paved routes.

Before I came to Brasília, I thought that distances would be pretty manageable on foot or by bicycle, but the map can be deceiving. Because of how the roads work (without left turns and without many traffic lights), you have to loop back and forth to arrive at any destination. Our home is 6-7 miles from work, depending on which route you take and, without any traffic, should take around 20-25 minutes. Sometimes, during the peak traffic hours, it takes around 40 minutes because there are a few choke points.

All to say that this is a city where a car is necessary to get to and from work, to visit your friends, to do your shopping, to do anything at all. Living in Brasília without a car is like living in Denver without a car. You just cannot quite do it.

So, we did buy a car to come here. Nothing special. A simple, small car with good gas mileage. Seemed smart at the time and we shipped it with our other goods to Brazil for our tour here the next three years.

Our car arrived last week. Apparently, a Mitsubishi Mirage has never been imported to Brazil before. The Department of Transport does not have a drop down menu for it. Hence, we are still waiting for license plates and have been told it will take a while. My initial jubilation that the car had arrived is now a bit muted and I continue taking Uber and the shuttle, ever the more discontent at my lack of independence and mobility. Grrr.... Seems that it all is a bit of a mirage.

(And, yes, I know, these are a bit of first-world, diplomat problems, but I wanted to share my lack of mobility anyway.)

Day 12: Tomahawked

This post also diverges from a focus on Kazakhstan and instead is a bit more of a window into life abroad, I suppose. Today, we invented new a new verb to describe a phenomenon known as "to Tomahawk."

Stumped? So were we. Miraculously, we managed to get all of the paperwork in order to drive the car we purchased to drive here in Astana. Pre-installed on our machine was a techno-gadget and remote starting system called Tomahawk.

I've never had a remote start and the guidebook that I found in the vehicle was in Russian. Oh, boy! We fought to get the alarms system off to get into the car to air up the tires and move it. Success after madly punching a million buttons. Our new car is a manual, so we parked it in gear with the parking brake on to use the next day after the insurance came through.

The next day when I headed to work, I found my car in the fence with a dented fender. Harumph! The fence didn't suffer so much. The car could now use a bit of plastic surgery, sorry to say.

Completely confused about what had happened, we finally deduced that the auto start was set on a timer and somehow the vehicle turned itself on during the night, and, since it was in gear, rammed itself into the fence. Now that really is something -- a car that can have its own accident!

A few more frustrating incidents with the alarm system and I think we finally have a handle on it. Apparently, if you have a manual transmission with an auto start system installed, you need to leave the car in neutral for auto start. The auto start function should not work if the car is in gear, but our system was apparently installed incorrectly, something that would have been better to know before rather than after. But the lesson is learned and there's not much we can do about it now. Our next car adventure should be the trip to a local body shop to make the car look pretty again.

We returned home and made a spectacle out of fighting with the alarm system in a few parking lots along the way only to find that our new car does not fit into the parking space designated in the garage of our apartment building. The overhead clearance is too low. In fact, we cannot even drive around in the garage without scraping the roof -- something I guess we'll have to resolve before the temperatures hit -40 this winter. But that battle is for another day.

And now you know what it means to be Tomahawked -- feel free to use the coinage as necessary!