We got our Wish! :) It took a long time but we finally got our Toyota Wish last Sunday. Yay!!! :) We'll continue walking to most places when we can, but it's nice that we don't have to rely on Scott, our Team Leader, for rides all the time anymore. We still need him when we go places though as our translator and advisor so he's not quite off the hook yet. :)
Japan must be one of the few countries where you don't drive off the parking lot with your car the day you buy it. Scott Murray actually put a deposit down on the car for us a while before we arrived but they needed 1) our family seal/stamp (inkan) on the contract but more importantly, 2) our family stamp's official certificate which you have to get at the local city office and 3) a form completed by our landlord to say that we have our own parking space before they could proceed. If you don't have a place to park your car, I guess you don't get a car! After we presented them with the documentation, it took them about a week to check our parking spot and I guess some other things too. 
The first picture is of Juhee standing in front of our car, parked on our parking spot in front of our landlord's house for the very first time after Peter brought it home from the dealers'. The second is of Peter at the driver's wheel - on the other side! - the day after we received our car. He drove for a couple of hours that day as we went to the first ever Pioneers' Japan Area Retreat with 6 people (2 adults guests) in the car. He was great! :)
The third picture is of our two kiddos in the middle seats. Juhee can actually reach over and touch Sungjae, something she couldn't do in our minivan back home. There's another back row for 2-3 ;) people. The fourth picture is of my changing Sungjae's diaper in the front seat while we were stuck in a traffic jam. Yes, I unbuckled my seat belt, climbed into the back, unbuckled Sungjae, fed him solids, changed his diaper, and played with him in the
front seat while Peter was driving. I've also nursed him a few times in the back while going from one place to another. And last but not least, this is a picture of the road leading to our parking spot. There's only room for one vehicle, and even for one vehicle it's really tight, so if you meet a car coming in the other direction, one of the cars has to reverse all the way back to a point where one can pass the other. The other driveway to our parking spot is really narrow
too. I think I'll get used to the driving fairly quickly (I hope!), but I think having to maneuver past other cars on super narrow roads and reversing is going to take a while. I'm sure I'll be saying this a lot, but life is very different here! :)
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