>>>The headlight switch on that Skoda car was in the driver side door. In US, as far as I know, these switches are on or near the steering wheel. Otherwise, the car was very nice.
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>>We don't have parking brakes here. They are called hand brakes.
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>>When I first rented a U-haul truck, it was an automatic one (I guess they are all Fords), and I couldn't find the hand brake. I figured it was automatically tied with the gear shift, i.e. it would engage in neutral and disengage in any other. Well, wrong. A couple of miles later someone signaled me that my rear wheel is letting out the magic smoke... so I quickly looked around, and saw that hey there's a red light on the dashboard, and there's a prong sticking out of the floor, somewhere by the door, looking like the old Moskvich headlight flip switch, or the Citroën ID-19 brake pedal... so I pressed it and voila, the hand brake disengaged.
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>I have had some cars that had hand parking brakes and some with a foot/pedal parking brakes. But I almost never use it; only when I park on a steep driveway.

I was like that before. Eleven years in Virginia have taught me that it's almost never exactly horizontal, and that the car's ball bearings present far less resistance than they did in seventies and eighties. So I'm pulling the hand brake every time I park, and many times when I'm waiting at the light and not quite sure it's completely horizontal. Justin Case is my friend.