Upon our arrival to St. Louis, Missouri, I and Dave quickly decided to purchase a car. The area where we are living is delightful: huge trees and rejuvenating parks, little squirrels running in the grass, two-story century homes with the great American flag. All around seems like a scene from Desperate Housewives on steroid. Not kidding.
As a drawback, it is quite distant from everywhere, so to actually see something of St. Louis, or – basically – to do any kind of everyday activity, you would need a car.
We knew of course that having a car in the USA has a little different meaning than in Europe. A car here is your guarantee that you can get the most out of life, either your aim is to travel and visit great places or simply go for a big grocery purchase without asking a lift from a friend. We want both, hence we need a car.
You would assume that buying a car is a rather straightforward, almost dull process - go and check it than just simply purchase one. Well, maybe this is true if you are local, but doing this fuss as a newcomer gives the process a special edge.
Purchasing a car took us a month (and we set a rather hard pace to follow). Instead of being a mundane duty - as we initially expected - buying a vehicle turned out to be our most interesting introductory course to the American society, and owning one seems to be our baptizement to this greatly motorized continent.
1. Administration phase
The full process starts with getting a piece of paper in front of you (the bigger the better) and draw a flow chart of the zillion steps you would have to make to end up with a car.
One of the first obstacles to getting through is doing your driving license. Yes, sir, it doesn’t matter that you have driven thousands of miles with a (what you understand normal) manual transmission car in Europe, insurance companies will punish you for not having an American driving license. So you need to get one before you start the actual buying process.
And here is the funny part: you cannot have your driving license done without - guess what - a car.
So you borrow a car - the first of the many occasions you will need to do so - and go to the DMV office.
While waiting to perform at the driving exam, I watched the allegedly 15-16-year-olds performing theirs - the legal age in the States for obtaining a driving license. One of the candidates was such a small, fragile-looking girl trying to park with a huge SUV that I’ve kept wondering if she is tall enough to reach the break with her leg. The exam takes approximately ten minutes, with one simple parking task at the end. Let’s put it diplomatically - you don’t have to be a Michael Schumacher to pass.
So, once all this is done, you can actually start looking at cars. Hurray!
There are a couple of things you realize while spending hours and hours sitting in front of your laptop, searching for ads.
FIRST FOR SOME STRANGE REASON THERE ARE CAPITAL LETTERS AND NO PUNCTUATION WHATSOEVER IN SOME ADS MAKING IT ENORMOUSLY DIFFICULT TO SENSE THE INFORMATION PROPERLY
Additionally, in most cases, there is not much information provided, and hence you are calling almost all the promising candidates to provide you with more detailed description of the car. During these calls, you grasp that you quickly need to expand your related vocabulary - as you try to process information about ‘timing belts’, 'driving belt’ (what the hell is the difference?), 'pistons’, and 'cylinders’ - just to name a few. Sometimes the Hungarian translation didn’t help much either about the parts and their responsibility on keeping the car moving. All this in various local accents – some of which you struggle to understand over a phone - just to make things easier.
Sometimes you call private people, but mostly the answering voice on the other end turn out to be a dealer. Some of them have funny names - like one guy who insisted on being addressed as 'Captain Kirk’ (obviously having a Star Trek-overdose). Talking to them is sometimes like listening to a podcast - they didn’t stop speaking about possible warranties, and other great cars they have, and how they are the best to buy from, and how this is going to be the greatest purchase of your life, and yes the former owner was a single, non-smoking mother, who has only driven “her” (meaning the car), when she took the children to church on Sundays. Yep, just like every other former car owner - young males tend to get around with bicycles in that narrative…
Finally, you narrow down the huge supply to a list of few - the ones you actually would like to see. At that point, you absorb that without a car, you have no means to buy another one - there is no way you can keep up with the costs if you travel to each potential beauty with, let’s say, Uber. The city is expanded, with numerous and widespread outskirts, where most dealerships are located - you have to bridge great distances to see the cars.
So you go and ask to borrow a car again - based on our experience, I would suggest you ask for at least a couple of days.
3. Checking the chosen cars
Unlike in Europe, most cars in the USA comes with automatic transmission. I remember when we first tried such a car and realized that we don’t know what to do with an automatic transmission. We were sitting in the car, ready to drive it and feverishly googling how exactly you have to use it - and I am sure that looking at us from the outside, the owners wondered what were we looking at so hard. (Ever run into this situation, just say you checked Carfax, makes bargaining easier.)
On the way, we’ve met families, dealers, and mechanics, a lot of people with different age and background. Almost everyone asked where are we from and what are we up to here in St. Louis. I remember someone particularly, a nice guy in outer St. Louis, who got really excited about our Hungarian citizenship. It turned out, the family of his mother arrived from Budapest in the 1870’s. We were standing next to the car to which we wanted to take a closer look, but didn’t talk much about it. (It wasn’t a good deal anyway.) Instead, we shared family stories with each other. It was an incredible moment.
Finally, we found what we were looking for. I felt fabulous when we borrowed a screwdriver to fix our official Missouri plates into place - let’s show off with our Show Me number plate.
All in all, I feel we gained more than a good car - we gained the capacity and confidence of being fully part of the local community. We passed the initiation game, got hold of some great memories. We are ready for you, America.
The original post appeared on hmepblog.tumblr.com, on 11/10/2016, and I thank the opportunity for the HMEP to post my work there. As always, the credit for the photos goes to Dave. The purchased vehicle is a 2003 Mitsubishi Lancer - just to answer all the question from you about the type. ;)
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