Renault Redux

Finally, I’m legal. It took seven weeks (3 ½ of them without the car), and hundreds of dollars, but my car is now legal. Not, of course, that it prevented me from driving it when it wasn’t, but now I can get in a fender-bender and not be in really, really big trouble. I thought French bureaucracy was bad, but it is not even in the same league as Turkey. We’re talking single A ball vs. the 2004 Red Sox. We are talking my alma mater’s football team vs. the NE Patriots, we are talking…well, yes, we are talking Boston sports teams. ANYWAY, dealing with the French was just a warm-up, and not enough of one to make me zen-like about coping with the Turkish process of registering a car. Patient and uncomplaining I was not (am I ever?). Seven weeks!! Just imagine if I was a law-abiding citizen and had waited that long to drive…

So the process goes something like this: You buy a car from another foreigner, to make it easy - easy being a relative term. This person hires a Turkish representative to go to Customs and deregister the car. Your car then sits at Customs, incurring fees for each day it sits, until the Turkish representative that YOU’VE hired goes to Customs to retrieve your car (with ten, I repeat, no less than ten documents supplied by you). Said representative keeps your car until Customs sends a document in the mail to Traffic. Document may not be hand carried or hand delivered. For legal reasons unclear to me, it must be mailed. Customs and Traffic are not that far apart, but document takes eight days to arrive. Then car is driven to Traffic, where it is inspected and hopefully given license plates. Above all, do not hope for speedy license plates during Ramadan. Yes, Ramadan started Thursday the 13th, about the time I needed license plates. Rejoice when process is complete. Then obtain legal, notarized letter in Turkish stating that you have permission to drive car. Car legally has to belong to husband, you are only borrowing it (which, I hasten to add, has nothing to do with me being a female, but has everything to do with me being the spouse of the foreigner working in Turkey). Drive without letter and have accident, or loan to someone else who has an accident with your car, and you are looking at a $50,000 fine given to the owner of the car. No, you did not miscount the zeros.

I’m pretty sure all this aggravation is karmic payback for the complaining I’ve done in my life about the DMV. Come to think about it, and I’m thinking out loud as I write this, I was JUST grumbling about the California DMV in early August, right around the time I bought the car! Long story - lost license, impossible to reissue without being there in person, etc. And I was bitching and moaning about some poor customer service I received. So perhaps I actually deserved all this! What a novel way to look at it. Another reminder folks, if you didn’t hear enough of it from my France emails, is that if you start feeling less than enthusiastic about your own country, move to another one. All those ungrateful feelings will evaporate. This is not in any way a comment about Turkey. I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE living here. It’s just a reminder that you have more ease, opportunities and freedom in the US than you can possibly imagine. Well, if I’ve annoyed you, relax, I’m getting off my soapbox.

And now that I am lawfully ensconced in my driver’s seat, I am free to purchase gas at over $9.00/gallon. Nope, you didn’t misread that number either. And please refer again to the above comment re: ungrateful feelings. I’ll admit I have been an advocate for more expensive gas in the US to force some change in our fuel consumption, but my “walk your talk” philosophy has been sorely, sorely tested (read: tested and failed) in the face of $128 fill-ups. That’s just a standard sedan. SUV people are paying over $200 per full tank. You can be as snarky as you want about SUV owners paying what they deserve, but $128 ain’t no picnic either.

So it’s another sunny day in Turkey, and I’m legal, broke, and ready to do battle once again with the forces of Ankara traffic. Onward.