Licensed to Kill (almost)

Since we are here for the long term, Washington State kindly gives us 30 days to get a license or stop driving. So a little less than three weeks later, Pearl and I are down at the DoL queue waiting in line. No not the Dole (unemployment benefit) queue, the deparment of licensing. Actually Pearl went first. She waited all of 10 minutes to get served, sat her license, passed and then was pretty much out of there.

I went down today after checking out the queue length at the Bellevue office, which was supposed to be 0 minutes. I get there and pick up a ticket which had the number 82 on it. Looking up at the counters to see what number they were up to, I was horrified that it said 40. After an hour of waiting they were getting close. I happened to check the little notice above the testing machines. After sitting the test, I needed to get another ticket and wait to be served again. So I quickly grabbed another ticket, number 144, sigh.... it was going to be a long day.

When my first number came up, I was so lucky as to get the grumpiest person serving. She chewed me out for forgetting to put the apartment number on my address. Then when I took the eye exam, I didn't see any of the text on the left hand side, so I asked "Am I supposed to close one eye?" and she snapped back "Do you drive with one eye?". So I closed my right eye to try and find the missing text. The problem was that I couldn't converge my eyes correctly to see the text. So I faked it by using one eye and then the other to read the letters. I am not going to fail this because of some stupid eye test that doesn't really work. The test itself was fairly easy, but I apparently know nothing about headlights and distance because flunked those two questions.

So come the first week of March both Pearl and I will sit our practical exams. Between now and then we will be busy practising our parallel parks with the new car. Taking a driving test in the van will be a challenge, it is so hard to stay under the 30MPH limit with a V6.

Wheeling and Dealing

It is time to get some wheels and join the masses with an urban assault vehicle. Will it be a Hummer H2? A Ford F150? Or perhaps a Dodge Ram truck. Nah, we have to be sensible, we are not even considering an SUV. We want the smallest thing we can find that fits more than 5 people. A V6 3.5L minivan with motorised sliding passenger doors and seating for 8.


A couple of weeks back to went to see the Honda guy, and a nice Japanese man gave us a polite overview of the Honda Odyssey. All well and good, but we weren't ready to buy. We needed to check out the competition. Second on the list was the Toyota Sienna. After seeing these two minivan (yes, Pearl is going to be a soccer mum), there wasn't an awful lot different between them apart from the price, and even that is artificially different.

Having never bought a vehicle in my life, this whole experience was very educational. I know that you usually bargain with the dealer, but this was one more step beyond that. We settled on the Sienna because of a couple of neat features that really fitted in well with what we wanted. So, we sat down with the dealer, a nice friendly looking chap, to start talking price. But as soon as we did, he said he had to go off and deal to something else but this other guy would help us out. This "other" guy was very apparently the negotiator. The typical fast talking smooth operator. We haggled our way in a very friendly orderly fashion to get what thought was a good price. The price still needed to be approved by the manager, but the expectation was that shouldn't be a problem. But oh no.


Our original sales guy came back with the approved price, a couple of grand higher than what we had negotiated to, basically taking us back to where we started. It became apparent that the first round of negotiation was just a method of getting our top price. And this second round was to try and extract as much out of us above that. Fortunately, I had my "negotiator" (my mum) with me too, and she was none too happy to have this stunt pulled on us. That put the sales guys onto the back foot and the "nice" sales guy ran off to grab his "negotiator" to try and even the playing field. We gave some ground, but perhaps we should have played hardball and just walked out. Hopefully we gave them a run for their money. Xander got something out of it. The "nice" sales guy got him a little NASCAR toy that I am sure was designed to annoy us with all the noise that it makes.

We picked up the van yesterday, but not after a lot of fun and games. The first thing we realised was that we didn't have auto insurance. Unlike New Zealand where people don't usually sue each other when they have an accident, here you need insurance to protect yourself against liability. You don't actually need to insure the car, but you as a driver must have insurance. So auto insurance is a silly name to call it, because you aren't necessarily insuring an automobile. Anyway, since Pearl and I haven't gotten our Washington licenses yet, there are very few companies that can or will insure us. And the ones that do charge an extraordinary amount. For 6 months it will cost us over $1000 USD to cover us, but once we get our licenses that cost will go down by nearly 50%. Fortunately being a town where there is a large population of new immigrants, there are many people out there who know how to deal with us folk. Hopefully within a month we will have our licenses and our premiums will drop to a more reasonable level.

And on top of all this, we needed our obligatory social security number which still hasn't arrived yet, which could be anywhere from a week to 3 months away depending upon who you ask. Oh yeah, and to avoid the riddiculous finance rates that the car companies offer to people like us, we paid cash. Even that was not without hassles. Apparently the federal government is suspicious of people paying with large amounts of cash. The car dealer had to accompany me to the bank to make sure that I got a real cashier's (bank) cheque, and they still require our social security number (which we don't have mumble mumble muble...) so that the government can track who is splashing cash around. Just because I don't want to pay their stupid interest rates I get to be treated as suspiciously as a known criminal.

So, now we have a car, insurance, no where to park... Whoops! Just as well the nice guy at the new apartment gave us access to the apartment early. All we need now is a new car seat for Xander and licenses for Pearl and myself. But that is a whole other story, so stay tuned...

Toys for Boys (and Mums)

The Mums have been out in force this week. hunting down the best toyshops in Seattle's East side. Apparently Xander is not particularly fussy about which toys he likes, but once he has one he likes, he will not give it up. In fact, his new ride on was so popular Pearl and Mum could not make him part with it, even when they were trying to put him back into the car. They had to pry his hands of it one at a time as they buckled him in. All the way home he had it clenched tightly in his little hands. But since then he has been wandering around the apartment pushing the cart around. To avoid this situation with the expensive toys, Pearl and Mum carefully navigate the store. And in the cases where a large expensive toy comes into his grip, they distract him with smaller and smaller toys until they can get safely out of the store.

Xander just loves the mall. They have two playgrounds inside. We discovered the second one recently and it is a bit more out of the way, and therefore less populated. While not as active as the other kids who jump and run around all over the playgroup, Xander takes his time observing the goings on and tries his best to explore the "ship".

Finding friends in this town should not be hard. He has already discovered Lily who lives in the same complex as us. She has a Cantonese live-in nanny, so my Mum has been spending a bit of time there chatting to the old lady. Xander has an amazing ability to charm the females, young and old. He is cheeky and saves his biggest smiles for the girls. I am sure this is part of his cunning plan to take over the world. He already has his mum and grandmother doing exactly as he wants, even though they think they are operating of their own free wills.

View more Xander pictures here