Since we arrived in Charlottesville on April 1, 1997, it was a big question whether to have a car or not. For more than a month we were quite negative about having one because we were planning to stay there only for 6 months as a whole, and so we kept saying to ourselves, "What's the point of buying a car spending a lot of money? We may go anywhere we want making use of the University Transit Service and the city bus. Perhaps it won't cost much if we call a taxi when necessary." We were right as long as the spring semester was going on. We had the privilege to catch the bus just in front of our apartment and both my husband and I found bus stops quite close to the buildings of the departments we belong to. A big yellow school bus came to pick up our daughter every morning and dropped her off on the same spot very punctually in the afternoon. The dogwoods were in full bloom everywhere in the city and we were happy to live in such a convenient place for our half-a-year leave from our teaching jobs.

It was true that shopping was a big task for our family especially when we had to get settled in a new place. We needed to buy not only daily foods but also various kinds of materials from boxes of Kleenex to a Hewlett Packered printer for our mobile computers. We thought of utilizing the delivery service. Some of the supermarkets had the service and it worked all right if only we were patient enough to endure the delay and the mistakes they made in numbers and the contents of merchandise we ordered. The frequent telephone calls we were obliged to make taught us how to talk to shop clerks efficiently in English. Every time we needed to buy something by ourselves, we went out on a shopping tour as a family so that each one of us could hold as many bags as possible. Sometimes we even dragged a suitcase to pack the goods we bought, not to mention the backpacks for heavy bottles and vegetables. We might have looked exactly like refugees with loads of bags, standing on the roadside to wait for buses to come. We didn't mind how we looked; we were just curious even to see cars passing by in front of us. In a foreign country, anything attracts you as something exotic and new. Our mind was open to the in-put of diverse information in such a high spirit at first.

However, we gradually came to realize how much energy we were wasting just for shopping. We could not help admitting we were tired after the shopping trips we made every other day. One rainy Sunday and it was a very chilly day for the season, we found ourselves waiting for a city bus in vain. There was no bus service on Sundays. After the graduation ceremony, suddenly the University Transit Service ceased to be during the weekends for a while. All we could do was to walk to the nearby stores. It was as if we had come all the way to Virginia to challenge a survival game. Time to think about buying a car. In fact we can hardly go anywhere in Charlottesville unless we drive. There is no bus service for the public to visit such a famous place as Monticello. It's something incredible to those who are from Japan where public transportation system is well equipped all over the country. We gave up our first idea of having no car. We bought one eventually; yet it turned out very soon that to obtain a car was not the end of troubles but just the beginning of the series of new ones. In Charlottesville we have discovered the society is built upon the assumption that people drive cars to live. Because we had not driven a car for more than 12 years, it was an amazing discovery. Car related issues have been settled in the core of our life.

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