Wujiang Woes (Part I)

Today's weather: High = 20 Low = 11
Haze

After a short teaching week, most of this Friday afternoon was free so I set out for Wujiang (next province over) to try and replace my Chinese drivers license.

Two years ago I was teaching at a school in a town called Luxu, part of Wujiang prefecture, which is part of the larger Suzhou prefecture. As with all administrative matters, they had to be done in the downtown part of Wujiang which was about a 30km drive from the school.

Two years ago I successfully passed a written test, in order to have a Chinese drivers license issued in my name. The process for that was, you can imagine, rather complex. For those who are interested, and if you're up to the task:

1. Get a translated copy of a drivers license from your home country
2. Take a brief medical exam (this is the easiest part) and a certified receipt
3. Sign up for a 100 multiple choice test, in English, of various road signs and markings. You need 90% to pass. There are books to study for this. When I did the test, I had to study from a Chinese book. I'm sure now they have the book in English and it also depends, of course, on which city and district you write the test. I did it in Wujiang at the time.

If you don't pass the first time, you can have another crack right afterwards. If you don't pass the first two attempts, you'll need to come back the following week and take another crack at bat.

I passed on the third attempt with 98%. Since all four of us did the test in a group, we pooled our resources and made up review packages by requesting printouts of all the questions we got wrong at the time. We then memorized all kinds of potential questions, including wrong answers.

Why memorize wrong answers? Because on the first two failed attempts, we discovered that the test itself had multiple design flaws. Several correct answers were clearly marked as wrong on the test, and we could prove it by comparing the study manuals and the printout of our own failed tests. No amount of arguing with the traffic police would get them to acknowledge this fact or change our scores, so we had no choice but to memorize all the questions where we had to answer them wrong in order to get the marks.

That being done, we all passed by the time we made the 3rd trip to the traffic police office. The drivers license came shortly afterwards. Then I knew I should be cherishing that document, because replacing it would be oh so troublesome if it were ever to be lost.

As fate would have it, I did lose that drivers license in the summer of 2010 along with my passport, two computers, two cell phones, a graphing calculator, various house keys, bank cards, and all kinds of other valuables.

You can bet I was beating myself up that summer.

With time, most of the valuables were replaced and the year continued on a much better note. But in the back of my mind, I knew I would eventually have to tackle the last valuable document to be replaced: the drivers license.

Having put it off for so long, I eventually made an attempt today in Wujiang and it ended in utter failure.