If you see my window wipers going, I'm turning.

Well, this just about sums up our initial experience driving here. It is one thing to drive on the left side of the road when you're accustomed to the right. It is still another to drive on the left side of the road in a car with the location of all the controls reverse to what you're used to. Whenever we would make a turn, we would invariably bump the windshield wiper stick rather than the turn signal. Elise apparently felt the need to make this sign and tape it in our back window, a signal to other drivers that we were clueless. We've managed to avoid any traffic accidents however, though once, David did find himself at a stoplight puzzling over why there was a car facing him directly across the intersection with the driver frantically waving her arms. Fortunately, there was not much traffic around at the time and he was able to scoot to the other side of the road. It was I, however, who ran into a left hand curb while parking and managed to put some holes in a tyre.

One interesting side effect of driving on the opposite side of the road was that for a time, David and I found ourselves switching the concepts of "left" and "right" and still completely understanding each other. If I was driving and David told me to take a right turn, I knew that he meant to take a left turn. If I told him the salt shaker was on the right of the stove, he knew I meant left. I think we've got it all sorted out now, more or less.

To augment the thrill of driving here, we also had to figure out how to read street signs in Adelaide. We've been told many times over how easy it is to navigate Adelaide; the city was planned and laid out with this ease in mind, after all. However, for all that navigational planning, somehow the concept of placing street signs at major intersections got lost. True, there is often a street sign about 100 m. before a major intersection, but it bears not only the upcoming cross street name but also the names of the neighborhoods this cross street can take you to either direction. Fresh off the plane from N. America, we didn't recognize these signs as street signs since there was so much verbage on them, they were larger than any street signs we'd ever seen, and they were not at the intersections. To lend clarity, sometimes there are street signs at an intersection - indicating streets one will encounter further down that road. It took us about 2 weeks to figure all this out; driving around Adelaide got a whole lot easier once we did.