Finally, after weeks
of beating around the bush at various garages and insurance companies and
filling out millions of forms, I have a car. Obviously it’s a Renault Clio, the
pinnacle of French engineering. Basically, I went to a second hand dealer to
save myself the bother of finding all the necessary forms and sending them off
to the nearest prefecture. I was
reassured by a few websites that the French are sou proud of their cars, that
any old Clio will be well looked after and if things do go wrong, it will be
easy to fix. So after my French bank details finally arrived, and the card a
few weeks later, I headed to the only insurance firm in town to enquire as to
the process. They informed me that first I needed to go and ‘reserve’ the car,
and get a provisional carte grise, then
return to the insurance firm with the carte
grise, which has all the car’s details, to sort out my cover. The nice
insurance lady had previously told me that I’d need proof of insurance in from
back home translated into French. This posed a little problem, even though I’d
been insured for almost two years, I’d been on a new policy for the last 10
months or so, and could only get proof of the most recent policy. I explained
this to them and they said that if I could get proof of 2 year insurance, then
I would only have to pay around €30 a month. If, however, I couldn’t get this,
and we could only use the most recent policy, I would be paying around
€130. Not ideal. Thankfully, I think she
took pity on me and we agreed a 1 month temporary policy, on the basis that I
had been insured for 2 years with no claims, and on the provision that I could
prove this before the month was up. With the insurance “sorted”, I headed back
to the garage the following day to pay for and collect my “new” car. After an
initial cock-up trying to write a cheque in French, all the paperwork was
sorted and I was told that they were waiting for a call from the MOT test
centre so I should sit tight. After about an hour of trawling through the
various gossip mags on offer, I was informed that the car was ready and they
were going to go pick it up. After another hour of waiting, my chariot was
ready, sort of. Trying to hear the mechanic over the sound of the hoover, which
he was frantically waving around the front seats, I understood that he wasn’t
overly keen on the brakes and wanted me to bring the car back in next week.
Rather hesitantly, I accepted the keys from him and attempted to set off with a
new found sense of freedom, attempted to. The problem was that I couldn’t seem
to get the car to start, and with every unsuccessful attempt, the car lurched
towards another sat in the garage. Reluctant to plough into a new BMW, possibly
one of the most embarrassing moment of my adult life was having to ask the
mechanic to back my car out of the garage for me. Since I’ve been in France,
I’ve learnt how to get over events like this, so I took the wheel once again
and finally managed to hit the road (on the right hand side). Quite an ordeal.
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| "Second-hand" |
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