We Have No Class

Danielle & I went down to the prefecture of police yesterday to fill out renewals for our residence permits (only a month after the last ones expired). We left the office with our récépissés for our cartes de sejour, which will hopefully delay our imminent deportation for the crime of not being French. Apparently this is a serious matter and applies to foreigners in many countries.

But anyway, the other thing that we had a year to do and are doing 14 months later is getting our French driver’s licenses. You are allowed to drive with your US license for a year, but after that you have to either give up driving or get a French license. Fortunately, Virginia is one of the states that has a reciprocal agreement with France and all you have to do is swap your VA license for a French one. No drivers test required.

Ha! “All you have to do” my ass! Of course you need a billion documents, including a certified, translated affidavit that you have never buggered a dead alligator on the Moscow subway. Just in case they ask. The first problem is that we don’t have our actual cartes de sejour, only the récépissés with the expired cards stapled to them. This will not do! But we can at least apply for the licenses. The second problem is that our certified, translated copies of our Virginia driving records for the last 11 years do not indicate the date that we obtained our very FIRST US driver’s licenses, which occurred shortly after the last T-Rex drew it’s final breath. We were informed that this is a very important date in France. Well, it’s very important in the US, too. But only to the recipient of the license and the importance declines rapidly to zero, kinda like our chances of getting any actual permits or licenses that day.

Once we pass the initial gauntlet (after we are told that the French consulate would have to contact the US consulate to get this date) and wait to see the French DMV grunt that will tell us everything else we have done wrong. Surprise, these guys couldn’t care less about the date we got our first permit to crash a car without another licensed car-crasher aboard. HOWEVER, they were quite baffled that our VA license translations listed AUCUNE as the class. This means none. We have no class. Now, I have wondered about this myself before. My PA license listed a class to ensure I didn’t try driving 18-wheelers to school instead of mom’s groovy, baby-blue 77 Mustang II. But I never worried about it and it never mattered, until now. But in the end they decided it didn’t really matter. We didn’t get our licenses (because we didn’t have our residence permits), but we got a nice piece of paper that says we can drive until we get the actual license.

UPDATE:

After three months, nothing!