Lessons on How to be a Grown Up

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I have officially purchased my first car.
If this was a test of whether I am grown up or not, I would get like the status of an 8 year old. I think my preferred mode of transport may be bike with training wheels.
Having not even had a car for 5 years, nevermind knowing a single thing about what is imperative to a good car, I sat down last week with the classifieds to discover the perfect car for me. Fat chance. Everyone manages to make their car sound wonderful in the classifieds, and seeing as my requirements were "works" and well, "works", I was not doing myself any favors in narrowing down my choices.
With that in mind I recruited my wonderful roommate Greg to take me to the Durban Drive-In, where people sell their cars privately, and you buy them, to avoid all the dealership costs. Its a great place to find cars, if you know what you're looking for, and can discern a nice car from a piece of junk. Therein lies my problem. The extent of my questions were pretty much, "so, does the engine work?" and "so it runs nice?"-If left up to me, as we all know, I would have just picked a blue one or something, blues a nice color. So anyways, Greg asks alot of wonderful questions, and we manage to avoid some bad cars. We finally find a Honda Ballade, which is nice and take it for a test drive. He raves about how well the car runs, but i can't accelerate and its shaking and we can't figure out whats going on, and I look down, and I've forgotten to put down the hand brake. Gooood one Lauren. So that gave the seller his amusement for the day.
We won't even talk about my attempts to test drive the stick shift cars-lets just say I'll be taking an automatic. Even if it makes me Ms. Wimpy in the car driving department, I would much rather not stall out every time I go up a hill.
So I will be getting my new baby on Friday, after shes gone to the mechanic and such, and I will certainly name her and post pictures of her. Brad and I are actually sharing the car, since its way cheaper tha way, so their may be some debate about her gender, but let me say it here first, my car is most certainly a girl!
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Beyond car buying, things are going really well. Classes are getting tougher, but such is life.
After taking a decent amount of time off of running with my injury and just needing to adjust to SA, I have joined a wonderful wonderful running club and am going to start preparing for some races again. People race here constantly, like every single weekend. Its quite insane really, I'm imagining that the sports orthopedic doctors here make great money. I ran with a 50 year old guy yesterday who had run Comrades 4 times, ( 82 Km-an ultra)-he loves it. While I don't think I'll be doing Comrades, I am looking forward to getting back into some 10K's and Half Marathons. My knees are holding up well, and no sign of problems. So its nice to have those motivations back in my life again.
In a true example of the experience I am having here, I had a birthday dinner celebration last night for a girl from Zimbabwe, at a Norwegians house, with a Kenyan. It was one of those moments where you just have to look around a smile. We shared stories about cultural differences and had a great time.
I'll be hiking in the Drakensberg this weekend, so will hopefully return with some wonderful pics! Love you and miss all of you
Lauren

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Comments

[T Mill]

grrrr i'm feeling very jealous today