Friday, December 15, 2006
Anyone need a lift?
I'm nearly the proud owner of a new car. 'Nearly', notice, not quite, but it's only taken 256,000 stages, which is pretty good here...
Settle yourself down with a cup of tea, and I'll explain how it can take so long:
First you negotiate a price (in my case this took several days), and get a written quote from the dealer. You then take this quote to your work, where they give you 2 forms, both in Arabic, so I've no idea what they say, and you take these back to the garage.
Next you have to arrange a bank loan. The bank man will meet you somewhere to have a cup of sweet Arabic tea and he helps you fill in a form. Then he'll go away and think about life for a while, before calling the garage to let them know you've been approved (or not, if you're unlucky)...or in my case telling me the bank had lost all my details and asking me to fax them over again...
Still following? We're not there yet...
Then you have to go back to the garage and arrange the insurance. My dealer didn't have any way of taking a credit card payment, so I had to disappear off and get several thousand Riyals of cash from the nearest drive-thru ATM, pretending I was in a car (which was obviously still in the garage), and take that back to him.
Now I'm just waiting for the registration to happen, but as it's Friday it won't happen until Saturday...in shallah.
So hopefully this weekend I will have a completely impractical sports car and the first time I go over a speed bump, I'll probably take the exhaust off, but still...if I can't have a completely impractical car here, where can I?!
Settle yourself down with a cup of tea, and I'll explain how it can take so long:
First you negotiate a price (in my case this took several days), and get a written quote from the dealer. You then take this quote to your work, where they give you 2 forms, both in Arabic, so I've no idea what they say, and you take these back to the garage.
Next you have to arrange a bank loan. The bank man will meet you somewhere to have a cup of sweet Arabic tea and he helps you fill in a form. Then he'll go away and think about life for a while, before calling the garage to let them know you've been approved (or not, if you're unlucky)...or in my case telling me the bank had lost all my details and asking me to fax them over again...
Still following? We're not there yet...
Then you have to go back to the garage and arrange the insurance. My dealer didn't have any way of taking a credit card payment, so I had to disappear off and get several thousand Riyals of cash from the nearest drive-thru ATM, pretending I was in a car (which was obviously still in the garage), and take that back to him.
Now I'm just waiting for the registration to happen, but as it's Friday it won't happen until Saturday...in shallah.
So hopefully this weekend I will have a completely impractical sports car and the first time I go over a speed bump, I'll probably take the exhaust off, but still...if I can't have a completely impractical car here, where can I?!
