A Crappy Day in Costa Rica
Today was a hell of a day in Costa Rica. It started off early with much promise as I had an appointment booked at 7:45 for my RTV (government car inspection, more to come in a future post). Now, I haven’t written about our car buying process yet as it’s still on going but to make a long story short we’ve physically had our car for about 10 days now and still cannot drive it legally. Today that was all going to change, we were going to have automotive freedom. Or so I thought, until about 7:35 this morning when I found out the stack of papers I had from buying my car was missing the most important one, the certificate of ownership.
So after being turned away by the inspection office because I did not have the proper paper work I drove to work, illegally, where I hoped to get some help in finding out what the hell I had to do next. Now, I’m a pretty laid back guy, but this morning I was mad. I felt like Milton from Office Space “That’s the last straw.” I have now been angry twice since arriving here, once when the airport lost Maggie and today.
After some french toast (free breakfast Friday at work) and a small cool down period I was able to get all the information to our awesome “Get Shit Done” lady at work, Angelica. Turns out the lawyer who helped with the sale of the car “forgot” to give me the most important piece of paper I needed. This is also the second document he has “forgot” to give us.
Then to top the day off we were heading to Moto Psychos this evening for a few drinks. We finally arrived, 90 minutes late. But the day did come to a decent end with the proper paper work in hand and a few rum and cokes to take the edge off. Tomorrow we’ll try again to get our car inspected without an appointment this time. Wish me luck.
Update: So turns out today is a holiday in Costa Rica, Guanacaste day. And since it’s a holiday the RTV is closed so we couldn’t get our inspection done. But after reviewing all of the papers we had, and thanks to Google Translate, we realized that not only did we now have all of the papers we needed, but the car had already been inspected this year and everything was now registered properly. All we’re missing is a couple of stickers to go in the windshield.
With this new found knowledge we set out today confident that even if we did get pulled over we had all the appropriate paper work. So we drove, and it felt good.
3 Comments
jeremyl on July 26th, 2009
Hey Jay, glad to hear things are working out. I know that if you are getting upset I may have already gone postal so sorry for the hassles. Whatcha buy – Fiat 500?? 
your wifey on July 27th, 2009
You already forgot about the time your computer was detained, hehe!
carmenvirovec on July 24th, 2009
Aww Jay! Good luck tomorrow. Hope things go a little better. Think about you guys all the time. Take Care!!