Tag: car

  • My second visit to England

    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.

  • Changed a garage

    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 itโ€™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 […]

  • Owning VW Polo GTi

    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 […]

  • I’ve got a car again

    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! ๐Ÿ™‚ To do them you can hire a car at the nearest rental car shop, but it’s […]

  • Navigation

    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, […]