the purple integra

I had my shot at driving Weisu's purple integra on Sunday. Actually, I was in it for almost two hours, because he taught me how to drive stick shift! :) It was tough and scary, but kind of exciting too, when I got the hang of it. He's a good teacher though, so it wasn't as bad. :) The only bad part was that I had sort of nice sandals on, so I felt like I was stretching them out using the clutch and stuff (which is soo hard!), so I ended up driving barefoot, which made my foot hurt a little. :( I've wanted to learn how to drive a manual car for a while, so it's cool to actually be learning!! :) We started out at the parking garage on the top of Hearst and Piedmont, which was kind of scary because there were some pillars and I kept thinking I would drive right into the wall, but it turned out okay. It's strange how I totally forgot all the other driving rules, like looking both ways, signaling, etc, because I had to focus on the clutch and the gas and the brake and the gears and all that other stuff going on. Even for little things, like turning left or turning right, there were other rules. Then, we moved to a bigger parking lot above foothill where I tried 3-point turns, but that was reeeally hard. I think that's when the car stalled on me for the first time. :( That poor poor car... I felt so bad every time it had to make those unnatural crunching or revving noises. :( Anyways... it's a slow process... I can't even imagine driving in regular streets with other cars, taking the freeway, or doing stop and go traffic yet... yikes! We're going to swap these driving lessons with guitar lessons because Bryan and I helped Weisu pick out his very first guitar yesterday at Guitar Center!!! That was pretty fun, too. We narrowed them down to a nice, glossy sunburst Ibanez, a smaller matte Taylor (that HS has), and a nice solid Martin. Weisu got the third one, which bryan and I thought sounded the best. I finally got a guitar stand, too, so now I'll see my guitar sitting out in my room instead of in the case and I'll play it more :) (still sorta practicing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" for Jen's wedding... hehe)