The Beast is being replaced....

If you've been in Kansas or driven with me, you will know my big white suburban was graced with the name the BEAST....just because it's seems very fitting.  It was perfect to cram as many children, girlfriends, or all of the above into it and go play in the world.  Move ahead across the country, now visualize very TINY cramped roads if you are driving into any of the shopping villages, or even some of the underground parking.  Immediately, upon being the passenger in Valentin's rent a car, (a toyota Camry) I would cringe as we would try to squeeze through these places.  There are cars double parked..triple parked and then you need to fit in between, i would find myself inhaling thinking it's going to shrink the car! All i could think of is my car is going to be something REALLY small!!!  So this week we ventured into car land, first stop was as Andre' says, "a very scary place" to look at used cars. Valentin was checking out the one car we had called on and it supposably had only 9000 Kilometers on it, but closer viewing and it seems this cars brake pads were already toast, so is it just junk or someones toying with the mileage?  The sales rep couldn't really confirm either, just continued to say, oh, we do nothing to car, we just get it and sell it.  So surprise off to the new dealerships we headed thinking lets just be safe.  My new car, graced with the new name "peanut" since it's probably a third of the size of the beast will hopefully be delivered this weekend. We both were very pleased that soon we would have TWO cars, I won't be the loony taxi driving everyone all over.  Well the last two days we had a culture training and one of Valentin's questions were answered when we were going through the difference in culture.  One of the guys has found out in the office what car he was looking into buying and he kindly, but smiling, said, "oh, you shouldn't drive that to work" (he was speaking of my car) so until the training he's been kind of wondering what was that all about???  Well come to find out this is a very status ranking society, (not the Jones competing with the Jones), completely different from that, they will rank you in your level in their country here by where you are living, what you are driving, what clothes you wear..so his concern and why he made that statement to Valentin was the BOSS cannot be driving a Suzuki Swift, the employees will not be able to understand that.  So does that mean we should go out and get the Porsche even though it would cost close to 1/2 of what our house was worth in Kansas? My vote is to head for vacations on the cash and just keep the natives shaking their heads.