We've Got Wheels

We finally did it.  After 3 weeks of borrowing our sister-in-law's car, taking the bus on occasion, and walking when there wasn't any other choice, we bought a car! A little 2005 French Renault Diesel Modus with 120K on the engine, for an awesome 2000 Euros. We call it a "Brian car" (after our dear friend Brian), because this would be his dream car: Upright seating, no blind spots, fold-able back seats for outdoor activities and an overall pretty funky look. Marc loves it!

Now of course this doesn't take into account fixes we will most likely have to incur during the year, like changing the clutch!  But overall Marc and I feel like we're 16 again with our first set of wheels. Freedom!!  It's amazing how much you take it for granted after having had a car for the last 20+ years.  Even the girls were excited that we didn't have to borrow Tata's car anymore.

We would have bought something sooner but yet again we were not prepared for the multitude of steps involved.  Once we established our banking account, we had to wait 10 days for the account to be activated, weirdly tied to our new phone set-up and the ability to receive text messages. Of course the French bank wants to be able to send texts to a french cell number, and Bank of America wants to send texts to an american number. Actually impossible to make this happen, but we did find a work-around thanks to my mom. We then had to transfer funds from our bank in America to our account here, then go back into the bank to have them write a certified check to the owner of the car.

As a side note, buying a used car here requires 4 different documents, a "CT" (Technical Control, showing the car is safe enough to drive on the road - something the US might want to do), a "Certificat de non-gage" (showing the car was not stolen and no tickets are outstanding), a "Certificat de Session" (essentially showing the seller is willingly parting with the car) and the title of the car of course. All this needs to be signed and counter signed, quite a process! Once we bought the car then we had to take the paperwork to the insurance office to purchase car insurance and then wait in line at the Sous-Prefecture (think yet another government entity).  They then mailed us the "carte grise" (the car title), which we then had to send a copy of back to the insurer.  Wow!! As I'm learning nothing is a simple phone call here.  Back home, you'd pay the owner of the car, get the pink slip right then and there, give a call to your insurer, add the car to your plan and that would be that.

We're still getting used to the "tininess" of the car; although the big windows help it to feel bigger than it actually is.  It's interesting how all the cars here tend to be small (actually, everything here is smaller, and that will be the subject of its own blog post).  I have yet to see a big truck, even the delivery trucks are small.  And SUVs are rare; although in the wealthier areas that seems to be changing. Even the station wagons seem big compared to the other cars on the road.  The other thing is that the roads are pretty narrow.  Even in a small car you feel like you're either about to hit the car coming the other way or run over the poor pedestrian who has like 2 feet of a "sidewalk" to walk on. Marc was talking to his family about this one day and apparently as more and more people have moved into the villages on the outskirts of town they've made the roads "wider" (I think that's totally relative coming from the U.S.) and have essentially taken up any sort of sidewalk and replaced it with road.  So now what you're left with are roads butting right up to the front door of houses and pedestrians walking within inches of the cars going by them.  It's an adventure every time we decide to walk to school.  I still have about a month before my International Driving Permit should arrive in the mail, so for now Marc is my chauffeur.  But eventually I'm going to get to navigate these tiny streets myself.