Driving in China

Part of our plan from the beginning of this adventure has always been that I/we would get our driver’s licenses here and buy a car so that we could drive Alex to school.  He had private drivers for the first few months but it was just so expensive and kind of miserable not to be in more contact with the school via pick up and drop offs.

To get a license here in china, if you have a license in your home country, you only need to take a written exam, not a road test. Fortunately for me, my license from Illinois hasn’t expired and I brought it with me. The test involves 100 questions (out of a bank of over 1000) and you need to get 90 to pass.   This may seem like no big deal right? I’ve been driving for 20 years now, I know the rules – red means stop, green means go and yellow means go very fast. So I took the practice test…. 40 out of 100. What?!? Now, somethings I can chalk up to being translation issues- on occasion the translation was oil when it meant gas (a lot of people here say petrol for gas, and I think it affects the translation), but a lot of things were just brand new rules I was going to have to learn.

Some of you may be familiar with this concept, I know some states in the US do it and I think parts of Europe as well,  here in China there is a points system.  When you do something wrong, you get a certain number of points on your license for the infraction and if you get so many in a year there are consequences (license taken away, or here you get to take a refresher driving course and repass the test).  I have never lived in a State where there were points, so I didn’t have the slightest inkling on what would cost a point.

Apparently the Chinese government and I do not always agree on what should give you points or how many points it should give you.  For example, running a red light is 6 penalty points… ok, that’s a bad thing to do, that should be 6.  No license plate on your car, 12 points. That doesn’t seem nearly as bad to me, that you should get all 12 points right away for that.  Driving a type of car you’re not licensed for? 12 points.  There are separate licenses for manual and automatic transmissions.

It took me a while to learn all the penalty point questions, especially since the first practice website I was using didn’t ask any questions about them! When I finally was passing the practice test with a 93 or higher each time, I decided I was ready to go take the test. I asked my friend at work if she would go with me to help me translate.  I don’t know how she managed not to laugh in my face. She politely asked me if I had gotten an appointment… to which I replied a what now? I got spoiled by the Illinois DMV were you don’t need an appointment for anything, you walk in, wait 5-25 minutes and walk out.

Stephanie, who is my amazing friend,  didn’t laugh at me, instead she called an old friend ho works in the vehicle department at the police station to find out exactly what we needed to do.  Turns out it’s a lot.

1st- get license and passport translated by outside company (Stephanie did all that for me)

2nd  Get proof of residency from local (campus) police

3rd Go to police station and get eyes checked, hearing checked, and new photos taken

4th-  Go to the police station to make an appointment with the foreign department to make sure that I can take the test in English (they have to set it up)  Fun fact- to apply for the license, you have to sign your name…in Chinese. We hadn’t known that before we got there, so I had to practice once or twice on a scrap of paper and then sign it about 7 times on different forms. Plus side is now I can sign my first name in Chinese.

5th- Go take the test!

So Stephanie, and I should mention that this is all during the big new year holiday and she’s spending her days off driving around with me getting weird papers we need, picks me up and we drive over to the test station.  Clearly not a lot of foreigners around Haining have taken this test because as much as I normally stand out around here, this more obvious.  Stephanie has to talk to the police to tell them I’m here for the test, they have to spend time switching the program to English and then… it’s test time.

 

I sat down at the test, and the first thing that I noticed is that there is a camera on the desktop pointing at me, and I can see myself taking the test.  No pressure right?

The first couple of questions were great, felt good, feeling confident… then the next 5 were all penalty point questions which had not been on the practice test I had studied with.

I didn’t pass.  I got an 86 the first time, which, I think having not studied the penalties at all, wasn’t that bad.  So Stephanie and I had to go back to the police station, sign more papers, make another appointment for two days later,  and study from the better test guide.

The second time, I passed with a 94! Back to the police station to get my license. If you’re interested in a challenge, you can take the practice test here http://www.chinesedrivingtest.com/

This may seem like a small thing, but it was like being 16 again and getting it for the first time.  I moved to a new country, and got permission to drive here, where I can’t even read the signs on the road- that seems unbelievable to me.

The next hurdle was buying the car. I knew which car I wanted already, but it was about a month and a half before we had time to actually go and buy it.  Again, Stephanie came with us, and her wonderful husband Di,  Di is great with cars and managed to save us a lot of money and get us things like mats for the car and tinting on the windows included.  Once the car was bought, we needed to wait a few days to be able to come back and pick it up.

It was a full day of waiting around for various papers to be signed, insurance to be gotten (done at the dealership, so that’s nice), some other papers…. it was a long day sitting at a dealership. Around 5pm, everything was done and we were ready to drive it off the lot.

Oh, have I not told you what car we bought?  It’s a chinese brand, Geely, and we got the vision x3

 

It’s a small SUV cross over and it’s great.  Everyone here has been surprised that we didn’t buy an American car, but I figure we can always buy one of those back at home.

Since it’s been a few months of driving, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the roads here,  we’ve even done a couple longer drives away from Haining.