Oh, aren’t we negative. Just when we should be jumping up and down and celebrating, we have to add that nasty, negative “but”. Some people’s children.
Well, first of all, yes, we are thankful to have license plates! I spent the better part of 3 days, this week alone, in long lines and interesting conversations with officials trying to get the process completed.
In all, it’s been 107 days – over 15 weeks – that I’ve been trying to get license plates. And we haven’t been able to drive our van during that time. 3 months and 17 days with no van, and countless hours spent in lines over – how many times did I visit that office? 8 times? 9 times? I’ve lost count.
I could tell you stories about this week alone. Like how two officials came out of the office after I’d been in line for a long time and said,”Well, the power has gone out… we’ll see if it comes back on…”
Or the time when someone came and said they were only taking 45 more people that day, and there was some confusion over whether I was person #44 or person #46.
And every day they found something else that I needed to bring next time.
And because it took so long … I had to pay a fine. Yes, even though I started the process the first day I possibly could.
But – thanks to the kindness of certain people in said office, and thanks to many of your prayers, and thanks to God’s mercy – we have license plates!
But…
But, the van will be parked tomorrow, because we won’t be allowed to drive it.
First of all, to drive here in the city you need to verify (emissions test) your vehicle. And we can’t do that until next week (because it takes that long for the new license plate process to finish going through the system). That means we can’t drive on Thursday (tomorrow), or Saturday, or until after 11am any weekday.
To add to the fun, the people at the verification place and the license plate place are arguing about one of my documents. The people at the verification place say that I need to get a form, go to a bank, make another payment, and then wait several days more before I can get the vehicle verified (bringing us to the end of next week before I can even try to get it verified!). They blame it on an error on one of my documents.
The people at the license plate place say “That’s ridiculous! We filled the form out perfectly, you shouldn’t have to pay that extra amount.”
And even after that, the question remains – will the van even pass the emissions test, or will it need some work done first?
So I hope you won’t be too hard on me for adding the “but”. We are glad to have the van – that we can drive sometimes. But the adventure of finishing all the paperwork could continue for another week or two. And I have three days of work to catch up on in the mean time!
So what does that mean? That means that after three and a half months of no van, we now have a vehicle that we can drive every day (unless there’s an unusual level of pollution – sometimes the government adds special restrictions).
You may not believe it, but I have my visa. And the picture to the right is proof.
As some of you know, I’m in the process of getting my permanent visa for Mexico. Well, good news! The paperwork is almost ready, and next week – Lord willing – I will be able to go to do the finger-printing-and-document-signing to finish the process.