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Driving lessons

One of the goals we had for our college kid’s summer break, when he was able to come home for almost a month, was to settle his driver’s license, as he left the country only with a student permit. This time, he was back and had enough time to turn it into a nonprofessional driver’s license, which aside from allowing him to drive, also gives him another valid ID, since the national ID that he applied for more than a year ago has not yet been delivered.

Part of getting a driver’s license is practicing to drive, and since our student driver had learned enough to get his license upgraded to a non-pro, but had not logged enough Philippine driving hours to earn the trust of his parents to go solo, there was a lot of practicing to be had during his limited time here.

From the point of view of a dad, the toughest part of driving is parking. It is easy to make a car go forward, stop, and make a few turns every now and then, but upon getting to the destination, parking decisions have to be made and whatever plan has to be executed, usually in relatively tight quarters. This is the excuse I used to keep my kid ‘chained up’ given that he was already legally allowed to drive, but he still needed more experience in using the family car. I told him that as long as he cannot park with confidence, he cannot go solo yet.

If you come to think of it, as he learned the art and science of parking, we ended up doing more parking breakdowns and analysis than we did for driving. This is because when driving, there are so many idiots and morons on the road that I can rarely chew him up for doing the wrong thing. All I can do is to constantly remind him to always be alert and defensive and always assume that everyone is an idiot driver because this is the Philippines and not Japan.

Aside from the regular idiot driver, we also have jeepney and motorcycle drivers to watch out for. It is sad to see that no matter how tough the government tries to make the driver’s license process for new drivers, the bad habits of everyone else on the road still prevails and chaos still reigns. The jeepney and the kamote are the royal family of the road and there is nothing anybody can do about it. If you don’t drive like an asshole or an idiot, you will get eaten up by traffic, so new drivers eventually learn all the bad habits that are needed to operate a motor vehicle in this place where there are no rules, just diskarte.

Our kid won’t be driving a lot, at least not for the next 3 years while he is studying in Japan, so there is hope that he won’t learn all the bad habits of driving in the Philippines, but I don’t see any hope that the situation and general discipline on our roads will be any better if or when he comes back home and is ready to drive in this country where public transportation unfortunately sucks.

Enough about driving. Let’s go back to parking, where you can’t really blame everyone else for being a bad parker, because when it comes to that, it is all on you. There is nothing as satisfying as making the correct judgements and executing the parking plan perfectly in one try, as it is frustrating to have to do the parking dance for minutes, without gaining ground, because of poor situational awareness and ability in handling the car. In our kid’s case, the added degree of difficulty came from the car being a manual transmission. Well at least he has power steering.

My goal, given our limited time for driving practice, is to make my kid a better parker at the very least, because unless there is valet parking everywhere you go, or you drive a robot car, most drivers will have to learn to park their cars properly. That is what we practiced. Reversing, turning, estimating distances, and forgiving booboos, turns out to be a good avenue for parent-almost-adult-child bonding.

We ended the month relatively unscathed, except for a pretty nasty bumper scrape against our gate. Thankfully, the gate’s owner was kind enough not to charge us for repairs, and I will choose to turn a blind eye to the battle scars, so the tuition fee (for now) is zero, but I guess such incidents come with the territory of parenting, which I guess never stops.

The past month made me realize how much driver education sucks in this country, as it was frustrating to see a new driver witness and most likely absorb all the bad habits they see on the road. On the bright side, it also gave me a few precious moments to bond with my college kid, as we learned new things together as we navigated this chaotic part of life that is the Philippine road system.*

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