People drive on the left side here, which wasn't as confusing as I had anticipated it to be. At first I was a little uneasy in the turn lanes, but hey, I'm a foreigner, I'm expected to make a fool of myself in the middle of an intersection now and again, right? I do enjoy driving on the expressway though. I'm fairly sure it's unpoliced, I have never seen a cop car and I've only seen one person getting pulled over on the main road (never on the expressway) in the entire 5 months I've been here. That being said, I like to top out my 140 km/h car as often as I can when cruising on the expressway. The weird thing about the expressway is that you're either going fast, or you're going painfully slow. For example, though the speed limit is 80, the slow lane (the LEFT lane here is the slow lane) likes to go 70 and the fast lane is the go-as-fast-as-you-want lane, on the right. I've been going 130 and cars have passed me like I was standing still, and this is a daily occurance. Sure there's talk of cameras and mailed tickets, but I call it hearsay :)
One of the fun things about driving here are the tunnels. The island we're on is very mountainous, and there are hundreds of tunnels carved right through the hills. Sometimes I'll be in a tunnel for 5, 6 minutes. It used to make me a little claustrophobic, but now I don't even think about it. You can pick up a good 10-15 extra miles per kilometer in the tunnels because of the lack of wind resistance. Which brings me to my next point about driving
WIND. Wind here is a big factor when on the expressway. I always find a safe speed by looking at the wind socks (they are about every 10 km on the expressway, and fairly large and heavy-looking). If the wind sock is parallel to the road, I can't go over 100 kmh because the gusts will pull my car forcefully in their direction. Not so fun. The car I dive also weighs about 200 pounds--not substantial. We were warned not to drive fast when the wind socks are going because the winds have literally flipped cars clean over during typhoon season, when the winds are at their worst. And given that my car has roughly the structure of a tin can--I am not going to walk away from an accident like that.
There are so many motorcycles and mopeds here, it's crazy. And mopeds are usually driven really slowly by people and they hover in between the bike lane and the painted line designating the bike lane from the road, making it tricky to pass them. I followed one moped at 40 km/h for about 10 kilometers once, because there was too much oncoming traffic to risk it. Aside from that, it's all good. Occasionally you see a very well dressed person on a motorcycle or moped, which always throws me off. Girls sometimes wear high heels and stuff on them.
Aside from all that, if you don't want to drive, in a few cities you have the option of taking one of these instead:
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