日本文が後ろに続きます。
I revisited the UK in September as my first visit there in February was very nice. This time I went to Folkestone, Kent, where it was taken place by the musical Half A Sixpence I watched at Kokugakuin Tochigi High School, via Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Rye, and New Romney.
２月に初めてイギリスに行ってみたのがすごくよかったので、９月にもう一度イギリスに行ってきました。今回は國學院栃木高校の文化祭で観たミュージカル「Half A Sixpence」の舞台になったケント州のフォークストンへ、ブライトン、タンブリッジウェルズ、ヘイスティングス、ライ、ニューロムニー経由で行ってきました。
日本語のほうはフォートラベルに旅行記を転載しました。以下は英語だけです。
(more…)I found an open-air car park near my flat and signed a contract for it at the real estate agency. I use a lift parking within my flat so far, but my car is supposed to be stowed underground, so it’s too much trouble to lift my car to the ground, bring my car out of the gondola and lift it down again every time I drive out. Besides, the monthly fee for the new garage is lower than the annoying automated garage!
As the contract took effect on 1 March, I moved my car to the new garage. Now I can open the bonnet to check the engine oil level and brake fluid level before driving. I couldn’t do it at the old automated garage.
日本文が後ろに続きます。
I’ve bought a new car. I wanted to drive a German car before I died, so I sold my Peugeot 307 I had bought two years before and got a 2007 Volkswagen Polo GTi. In fact, when I got the Peugeot 307 I wanted to have Audi A4 or VW Golf or Polo, to be honest, but my budget at that time forced me to have the French car by compromise. Peugeot 307 was a nice car, though.
It has a manual gearbox. Probably it would be the last for me to own a manual-transmission car and even the last petrol car I can have because carmakers will sell more and more electric or hybrid cars in the future and such cars would have a continuously variable transmission or a dual-clutch transmission rather than a legacy manual gearbox.
I drive it weekly to get used to its manoeuvres. There are some differences from the Peugeot. At first, a clutch biting point is much lower. As soon as I gently lift my leg with the clutch, it starts to bite. Another difference is that its engine rarely stalls when you lift off the clutch pedal completely in the first gear even with the handbrake on. When you drive on the street, it dashes out very fast by gently stepping on the accelerator. If you give it full throttle, your licence would be at risk.
The clutch, brake, and gas pedals of the Peugeot were too shifted to the left, but it doesn’t go with the Polo. I have enough foot restraint space beside the clutch pedal.
A reverse gear position is different from the Peugeot or other major cars. You press down the gear stick, move it to the left with it pressed down, and then push it forward to put it in the reverse gear. It’s a similar manoeuvre to the first gear, but you should press down the stick before moving it to left and forward for the reverse gear so that you won’t make a mistake.
I don’t know how many years I can drive it, but I’m gonna have fun with it.
クルマを買い替えました。2007年式ＶＷポロＧＴｉです。かねてからドイツ車に乗ってみたくて、２年前にプジョー３０７を買うときもホントのところはアウディＡ４やらゴルフやらポロやらに乗ってみたかったところだったんですが予算の都合上妥協してプジョーにしたんでした。まあプジョー３０７もいいクルマでしたが。
例によってマニュアル車です。たぶんこれが私が乗る最後のマニュアルでしょう。これからは電気自動車やらハイブリッドやらが主流になってきて、そういうクルマはＣＶＴやＤＣＴが乗るでしょうから、純粋なマニュアル車というのはだんだんなくなっていくと思われるので。ひょっとするとガソリン車もこれが最後かも。
とりあえず操作に慣れようと毎週引っ張り出して運転してます。プジョーと違う点がいくつかあって、まず半クラッチの位置がポロのほうがだいぶ低く、ちょっと足を上げただけですぐつながります。プジョーなら相当足を上げないとつながらないので坂道発進が怖かったですが。あとなかなかエンストせず、ローギアに入れていればサイドブレーキを引いたままクラッチを完全につないでもエンストしないという恐ろしい仕様です。道路を走ると、ちょっとアクセルを踏んだだけで加速が凄く、高速道路でちょっと踏むとすぐ１ｘ０ｋｍ／ｈになるし、アクセル全開になどしようものなら免許証の危機になりそうです（笑）。
ベダルの位置はプジョーみたいに左に寄ってないので、フットレストのスペースがあります。
バックギアの位置がプジョーや他と違っていて、ギアスティックを押し下げて、押したまま左に倒し、そのあと前に押す形になります。ローギアの操作とよく似てるんですが、最初にギアスティックを押し下げるので、間違えることはなさそうです。
ヘッドライトはウインカーレバーの先端をひねるのではなく、インパネ右側の通風口の下につまみがあってそれを右に回します。１段回すとスモール、もう１段回すとヘッドライトです。つまみを１段引っ張るとフロントフォグランプ、２段引っ張るとリアのフォグランプも点きます。
何年乗れるかわかりませんが、エンジョイしたいものです。
日本文が後ろに続きます。
I’ve made up my mind to have my own car again. Two years and nine months have passed since I parted with the last car in May 2008 and then moved to a house much closer to central Tokyo after I did it. The place where I currently live is so convenient that you can live without owning any car. Nevertheless, without a car, it’s difficult to go on a slight outing late at night, to buy bulky goods from Costco, or to drive a car aggressively to get rid of your stress! 🙂 To do them you can hire a car at the nearest rental car shop, but it’s less convenient than having a car you can do as you like. That’s why I’ve decided to get my own car even if it’s much more costly.
To find an appropriate car, I checked Yahoo! Japan, Goo-net, or other websites listing up used cars and shops after I got a bonus last December. Of course, I had no choice to have a brand-new car. I wanted to have a small-sized, 5-speed stick shift car instead of a large automatic saloon because I wanted to do as Englishmen did (most of them drive stick shifts rather than automatics). I thought that manual transmissions were better for small cars giving more pleasure to drivers and that it would be the last chance for me to drive a stick shift as almost all cars to be released in future would, petrol or hybrid, have automatic or continuously variable transmissions.
At the end of last December, I found a car that I felt to be nice at a small used car shop in suburban Tokyo. It was a 2002 Peugeot 307 Style (1600cc petrol), costing just 380,000 yen! I decided to buy it without hesitation.
It took much time from the purchase to the pickup. In Japan, you must register a car you buy to the government before owning it, and before the registration, you must settle a parking space and have the garage certificate from the nearest police station. To have a garage, you must sign a contract with a local real estate company offering car parks in the area where you live. The trouble is that the real estate company and the police station open only on weekdays, so I had to take a day (or some hours) off to do those things.
The average parking space rate in the area I live in was about 30,000 yen per month, but I found a car park renting a parking space for 26,500 yen per month.
Anyway, all of the procedures to have the car had been done and I picked it up today.
(more…)
日本文が後ろに続きます。
Last week I bought a portable navigation device (Garmin nüvi250) for my car because I had bonus this month and I did “holiday shopping” like an American. Although many cars in Japan have in-dash HDD car navigation systems costing over 300,000JPY with a receiver for Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS), they were too expensive for me to afford. Nüvi250 has only a GPS receiver and power cables to be connected to a cigar socket or PC’s USB port, so it’s very cost-effective, costing only 38,500JPY! (about one tenth of the prices of traditional HDD car navi) More than that, it is not only sold within Japan but used worldwide, because Garmin is an American company. Nüvi250 is widely distributed in UK, European countries and the USA (in the USA, nüvi200 is sold instead of 250).
This device is simple and does not provide traffic information to avoid jamming routes, but GPS reception accuracy is very good. It displays an accurate position of where you are driving, keeps track of your driving routes, and calculates routes to destination very fast. Road maps are very simple, and easy to see while driving. It is very useful for 38,500JPY navigation device, as long as you use it just as a navigator.
As it is removable from your car, you can carry it with you anywhere, on the street or on the train, and you can install it to a rental car in a district far from your home town or even in a foreign country, just by plugging the power cable to its cigar socket. When you leave your car, you can put it off the car and in your pocket. There are no risks to be stolen.
Navigation is navigation. No functions more than navigation are necessary. PNDs are the most reasonable navigation system of today and more and more devices will be released in a few years, because you have only to pay the reasonable prices for necessary and sufficient capabilities.
今月のボーナスで、先週カーナビを買いました。といっても日本のクルマに多い30万円もする据え付け式のVICS付HDDナビなどとても買えないので、今はやりのポータブルナビ（PND）というやつです。米国のGarminという会社のnüvi250で、GPSレシーバーの付いた本体をシガーソケットに挿して使うタイプで、お値段はなんと38,500円！（普通のHDDナビの十分の一です）米国のメーカーなので、日本だけでなく、欧米など世界中で使われています（米国はnüvi200という名前です）。
シンプルなので、交通情報や渋滞情報を出してくれたりはしませんが、ナビとして使う限りでは、38,500円のものとしてはこれで十分です。GPSの捕捉精度も良く、位置を正確にとらえてくれますし、ルート計算もメチャ速！ 地図もシンプルで見やすくなっています。
取り外し可能なので、道を歩いていても、電車の中でも、どこへでも持ち運べます。遠くの場所や海外でも、レンタカーに乗るとき、シガーソケットに差し込むだけで使えます。車から離れるときは取り外してポケットに入れることができるので、盗難の危険もありません。
ナビはナビ。ナビゲーション以上の機能は必要ありません。PNDは今日最も合理的なカーナビゲーションシステムだと思います。必要十分な機能に適正な値段を払えばいいわけで、今後数年でますます増えていくことでしょう。