Big big America

2006/12/04 2 comments

I’ve been in Irvine for a while now. For more than a month . Things start to get into its place. In this short period of time, I’ve come to realize that everything is huge here. Space is not a problem in Irvine. That is why the houses are bigger, the streets are wider and distances are longer. This logic doesn’t only apply only to physical distances, the general rule is the more the better, but I’ll dive into this topic in another post.

For now, let me just say, that I had to do many paperwork and since no car was available to me I had to walk everywhere. I’m positive that for the first 2-3 weeks, I was walking more than 4 miles a day. Open an account in the bank, buy an american cell phone, go to the supermarket, walk around campus from one building to the other, etc. Don’t take me wrong, I like walking, but there’s a point where you simply have to stop. On the other end, I’ve seen some (American) people asking for a ride to their cars which are less than 400 feet away . For some items, like furniture you definitely have to get a ride, but you can’t always force people to drive you around. The public transportation option is not that recommendable, since it is not like in Europe where big cities are really tight and you can easily distinguish the downtown where there are many transportation options. In California, since the space constraint is negligible, cities tend to expand into sparse populated areas and it is difficult to reach everything with a public transport network.

That is why a car is almost required. So, I started looking for one. Since my budget is limited I had to go for a used one. And again, since my budget is seriously limited I’ll have to share the car with somebody else, so the costs are split by half. Since I am a student and my classes are on campus, I don’t really need a car all the time, only for particular moments like when shopping or maybe on weekend trips, so sharing is not such a big inconvenience. A good place to look for cars is Internet. There are several pages which focus on buying and selling stuff such as the craigslist. For cars, I found specially useful the autotrader web page. Having in mind a 2000$ budget we started looking. For that price, most cars will be pretty old, but we where able to locate a 2002 vehicle. It happened really quickly. We found the car on internet on Saturday, and the next Monday it was ours. I think we were quite lucky.
This is the first car I’ve bought on my own. And so far, I’m very proud of it. Let’s hope it won’t let me down!
Here in America all cars are very big. I think SUV‘s are the most typical cars, and an engine with 6 cylinders or more is a must. Do people really need a 3000 kg hummer or is it just to brag? Our car is a Hyundai Accent 1.5. Compared to other cars it looks like a toy, but it has its advantages: such a small engine gets a great mileage. Being a corean car, it has a manual shift which is pretty rare in California, but that’s what we are used to in Europe.

The next step was getting a drivers license from California. Apparently, my spanish one is only good for rented cars. I was concerned, since back in Spain it cost me more than 600$ to get it (it is such a scheme), but here things work the way they should. Getting it cost me 26$, one night study and going to the DMV a single afternoon. What a difference! At the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) I found out that everybody can personalize their plates, so I think I’ll get my own:

What do you think about this?