Notre Voiture (postscripts added)

We finally admitted the inevitable: It would be a good idea to buy a car. Despite the American notion that everyone in Europe lives five minutes' walk from a train station and that you can easily take a train from any station to any other station, turns out that's not quite true. (Though it's pretty close if you happen to live in Paris.)

Daunted by the idea of trying to buy a good used car in a foreign country, Cricket and Dave were perhaps just a little too willing to jump at the chance to buy the cute little Open Corsa Viva pictured here (1995, with just over 100,000 miles) that we encountered on one of our walks. There are other cars that one sees advertised as "AV" (à vendre) on the streets, but many of them look pretty beaten up or are for a lot of money; and buying from a garage provides a guarantee but it appears that one pays a premium for this. For some reason we just had a good feeling about this car when we saw it. As it turned out, we got very lucky with this little Opel!

When we called the phone number in the window, the owner wasn't there so we left a message. There is this phenomenon we've experienced living here whereby -- probably because so much of our brains are being taken up by trying to learn the language -- we lose most higher reasoning whenever we are speaking in French. Thus, the things we say sound doubly stupid because even if one could translate our incomprehensible French, the end result would still be stupid.

I mention this because when I (Dave) left a message for this guy, I forgot to leave (a) my name; or (b) my telephone number. In all fairness, we did not yet have a telephone number -- there's a story there as well; cf. the earlier post about gas and hot water, but I digress -- and at least I remembered to leave an email address. I think. Fortunately, when I called we were literally standing outside the cell phone store waiting for it to open, so it wasn't long before we emerged from the store with a new cell phone, and then at least we were able to call back to leave our new number. Except that this time, the owner himself answered, so I had the even more awkward experience of conversing unexpectedly on the phone in French. Fortunately once again, the owner spoke a little bit of English, so between the two of us we were able to arrange a time to meet about the car.

The owner's name is Pierre, and he's in the picture next to the car. He used to be in the army, where he says he learned to be organized, so he actually had a file folder with every maintenance receipt for the car in it! He really could not have been nicer or more patient. We had these wonderful conversations in which we spoke broken French and he spoke broken English and together, we had no trouble whatsoever understanding each other.

Pierre was willing to hold onto the car for us while we transferred money from our bank account in the US and figured out how to buy car insurance. Actually, Pierre offered to hold it for us himself -- we didn't even ask. Not only that, he helped us by showing us his insurance documents and telling us where we could find an office for the same company, if we were interested. None of this was cheap -- car insurance in France is a bit pricey compared to the US, especially with the current exchange rate, and BOY do banks charge a lot of money for simply transferring money (really, how hard can this be? They're banks! And it's pretend electronic money, not gold bars!). But we got it done, and by the end of the week we had bought a car.

Postscript 1: We learned on Wednesday (Sept. 19) that it is possible to drive the car to the local tram stop, park there, and get round trip tickets on the tram for everyone in the car for a total of 1.50 euros. By contrast, if the four of us were to WALK ten minutes to the same tram stop -- perish the thought -- and buy the same tickets, it would cost us about 9 euros. In other words, in an effort to keep cars out of downtown Orléans, the local government is actually encouraging us to drive our car a distance we could easily walk. Hmmmm...

Postscript 2: The end of September and the explosion of our side passenger's window has partially convinced us that the huge number of things included in the "bare bones" French auto insurance might actually be worth it. Our bill for the in-our-own-driveway repair of said window, plus a replacement of the front windscreen that had a couple of dings in it: zero euros. Including service. Formidable!