I am well-chuffed. I passed my Chinese written driving test this morning. Got 99 questions correct out of a hundred. An hour later I was in possession of a lovely new Chinese driver's license.
Gone are the days when you can just pay someone to "translate" for you, i.e. do the test, while you sit back and twiddle your thumbs for 45 minutes. Now it is translated into about 10 languages, so there is no excuse for not being able to do the test in your own language. So I crammed for the test, rote-learning more than 1000 questions and answers over the past month, focussing on learning the (sometimes illogical) answers rather than applying reason in my responses to the questions, and learning the Chinglish way the the questions are phrased (thank you
http://www.chinese-driving-test.com).
Now I need to forget what I've learnt, and concentrate on learning how to drive Chinese style. There is some mad logic to it, I'm sure. Many of the Driving test correct answers refer to "yielding", which is an alien concept to Chinese drivers. But the cars do perform a strange crazy dance in traffic, which seems to work most of the time if you can play the game. I will probably not be using my phone, smoking, driving on the hard shoulder, undertaking, no seat belts, but I will assert myself on the road.
Now comes the exciting search for a car. Foreign makes are stupidly over-priced. (My Chinese brother-in-law bought a bottom-of-the-range version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee this year for about 600,000rmb!) Chinese makes are getting better, but are still a bit of a risk, like Korean cars 20 years ago. I am thinking about a Chinese SUV called Haval H6. They have replaced the dog of an engine from Mitsubishi for the smaller-engined version, and it seems OK - it's got all the toys anyone would want. I would buy used if I were in the UK, but I don't really trust used in China. Whatever I get, I will ask for some bull-horns to be thrown in, to deal with any "incidents". I will be buying in August. Would appreciate any advice from petrol-heads amongst you for a family car/SUV for up to 5 adults with good luggage space.
