lingqi's Journal: April 16th, 2003

April 16th, 2003 (9:15pm)

Tomorrow is fail-the-drivers-license-day. It should be tons of fun!

Anyway for saitama residents, it should go something like this:

10:00 - 11:30: show up and present your documents to the special "gaijin dept." (I kid you not)

Present the following:
1) foreign license
2) passport
3) alien registration card
4) photo (2.4cm x 3cm)
5) license translation
6) proof of residence (get this at city hall for 200yen)
7) 4,150 yen of cold, hard, cash

If everything checks out - and it should because I have went though the above list about four dozen times by now - you will enter the exciting stage of waiting, because the actual test, paper, eye-sight, or whatever, does not start until 13:00.

After that, of course, one is home free to whatever extent of home-freeness one might expect after going through a paper test that (I hear) only 20% passes on first try.

So, I will go and study the license booklets some more, ja?

Don't sweat the written

[johnot]

Since you're taking the test already in possession of a foreign license, the written (okay, computerized) portion of the test shouldn't be bad. As I recall, it was fairly short (on the order of 10 questions), and featured such posers as "In which of the following situations would it be permissible to speed?" "A) You are 20 minutes late for a company meeting; B) ..."
Well, I don't remember what the rest were, but that one seemed particularly appropriate to me, especially being the ?U???T?????}?? (nisemono-sa

driving licenses in other countries

[lpret]

First off, I enjoy your journal, I'm currently studying Japanese at university [baylor.edu], so your journal has been full of some good pointers. But I digress...

I lived in the Philippines for a few years, and I got my driver's license there. For the written test they first give you a "study sheet" which is the test with the answers filled in. Then they hand out the tests, without collecting the study sheets! Hilarity insues. Well, the funniest thing about it is that some of the answers on the study sheet are wro