Wheely Cheap (Yuk, yuk!)

Well, I am officially now with 100% more car.

After several weeks of looking for cars, the sales guy at Haleck Motors finally offered me a good price on a Nissan with a cracked windshield that they had been trying to sell me for almost my entire car-search. It was the best price I had seen on-island (with the exception of some mopeds, including one that would have to have the entire brake lines replaced) and the lowest mileage, so I bought it. A bit of shifting money from different accounts around, a bit of having Joey use his mad connections to get the bank to skip the ten-day holding period on all checks from off-island accounts, and the car was mine.

I also got them to fix the power windows, the power mirrors, the wiper blades, and take a look at the stereo volume knob (it was stuck at "sixteen year old with a new speaker system" during the test drive). But there was nothing that I could do about the crack in the windshield, the eroding paint job, the lack of hubcaps, or the door to the gas cap that doesn't close all the way. And their solution to the volume knob thing was to push it gently to the right while turning it. Somehow, it works this way. A nice steering wheel cover took care of that feeling that the rubber covering on the steering wheel was disintegrating.*

Despite all that, it runs great. Unlike most of the cars I've been in on the island, it's not squeaking randomly, the "Check engine" light is not permanently on, and it has far less than 100,000 miles. It gets me from Point A to Point B without a problem, and the exterior doesn't look bad at all when it's nighttime.

The tags already on it expired sometime in 2007, so I have to get those replaced before I get pulled over. But before registrating it, I had to have insurance. Typically, busineses on the island are open from 8 or 9 AM until about 5 in the evening weekdays and until noon on Saturdays. I called two different places on Saturday to get a quote and got no answer at either.

After my parents wisely convinced me to stop driving around uninsured ASAP, I just stopped at one of the places that sold insurance and got it on the way to work today along with some groceries and a new pair of sandals.** But before leaving, I called Joey to tell him that I was going to be in a bit later because I was getting car insurance.

I then went out and tried to get my car registered, but I couldn't find the OMG OMV, which is what the DMV is called here. I went to the place where the woman at the insurance company said it would be, but the building that most closely fit her description was most definitely the Office of Elections, a really huge and new building for a department that only really relevant about once every four years. The guy at that office told me that the OMV was at the giant Governmental center in Utulei, which happens to be about 30 minutes away, but on the way to work. I drove all the way there, and after looking all over the complex for the OMV because the guy at what I assume was the Information Table was asleep, I asked the guy sitting behind him, who was pretty certain that it was in Tafuna, where I just was. He took me to a map of the building we were in, and sure enough, it wasn't there. After telling it all to Joey at work, he explained that the OMV was crammed into a small group of governmental buildings that I had gone right past, drove around, and then turned around in the parking lot of, in Tafuna. Of course, there was probably no sign in front of it at all.

Telling stories like this to people that have been here a while are usually replied to with the phrase "Welcome to the island."

P.S. It's pretty difficult to get stamps without driving all the way up to the post office in Pago Pago,*** but I was able to buy a not-quite-full sheet of them from the lobby of the nearby Tradewinds Hotel. They had a really small selection (just the one semi-sheet) and I didn't look at them before they were swiping my credit card, so it looks like everyone that I send mail to will be wished a Happy Hanukkah for a few months.

*All of this paragraph is true.
**Not really.
***Which I attempted anyway on Saturday, only to find that they close an hour and a half sooner than the USPS website says they do.