Wednesday
was basically spent chasing our tails. Although we have a photocopy of our carte grise (rego papers) we can’t get a
new carte grise for the car at the mairie (town council) without the
original, nor can we get it without the CT (WoF/MoT). We tried every which way
to advance things but no go.
Thursday
was a different story all round and some big wins for us. Yeeeeeeessssssssssss! We headed into Perpignan to leave our car at
a garage there as pre-arranged on Monday. Arrived at 9am and caught the handy
bus soon after into the centre of town. We had all day to kill but we managed
to fill it very easily. There was a massive photographic exhibition on in a
number of the historic buildings in the city centre. 1200 photos from around 50 international
photographers had been selected for the exhibition and we spent an intrigued 3+
hours wandering around the various venues. The photos were stunning, mostly recording
coverage of wars - Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, refugee camps, the tsunami in Japan, the annual gathering of
millions of pilgrims at the Ganges River and so on. Incredible footage and
certainly thought-provoking. Not a lot
of fun given the content, but well worth looking through.
.jpg)
We didn’t
have much more time to fill in. Many of the shops were closed because it was a
Catalan Festival Day.
Collected
our car at 4pm and thrilled with its performance. Two new tyres, four new shock
absorbers and all wheels balanced have made the ride hugely smoother and
more comfortable. We are extremely pleased with it and don’t mind too much the
extra money needed to get it to this level of safety and comfort. We are now
‘good-to-go’.
After
having all this work done, we called into a Control Technique place on the way
home, to get the sign-off for the equivalent of our WOF. However, he can’t sign
it off because we don’t have the original of our carte grise. Grrrrr.
However......the best
win of the day was waiting for us when we finally got back home. Despite our
car sales woman assuring us she had posted the carte grise a few weeks ago, it had arrived by courier in the
postbox today. Yippee. We can now progress a whole bunch of things.
By this
stage it was 6pm and John was starting to feel ill. Yes, you guessed it, with
so much going on we had omitted to make sure he had had his coffee for the day.
A bad headache was threatening. Dashed to Bar Pablo for an emergency topup,
followed up by a panadol and lie on the bed. He manfully managed to avoid
throwing up this time and started to come right.
We had
already organised to meet our new Aussie/Zimbabwean friends for dinner at Café
de France at 7:30pm so I went to meet them and John stayed home. He felt well
enough in time to join us for the full meal. Our new friends have been here
only a week and were looking to buy a place. When we met them last Saturday we
pointed them to an apartment we had looked through ourselves and they had
actually signed up to buy it earlier today. They were keen to celebrate.
They had three of their four children
and their partners with them. We had a pleasant
meal together, our second, and John and I have now met all their children, most
of whom are professionals in London or Milan. A great night, and a late one.
.jpg)
