We have Israeli driver’s licenses!
The Israeli government made it easier last year to convert your US drivers license into an Israeli one. Basically, they changed it so that if you’ve had a US license uninterrupted for the past five years then you don’t need to repeat any driver’s tests or medical/eye exams. But since the normal way to get a driver’s license does involve those things you still need to navigate through those forms. So first you have to get a Tofes Yarok (green form) from a government-licensed optometrist. And when you go there, you just show them your US drivers license (which has to be more than 5 years old, or you need to have saved your old ones, or have a letter from your DMV to prove that you’ve had one for the past 5 years) then they’ll give you the form without making you do the eye exam.
So we looked it up on the govt website (helpfully provided by Nefesh B’Nefesh), and found the optometrist in a mall in Kfar Saba, the town right next to Ra’anana. When we got there, we figured it must be the right place because there were about five signs taped all over the entrance to the store, which thankfully I could read in hebrew, and which said “THERE’S NO GREEN FORMS HERE. THE GREEN FORMS HAVE MOVED TO HERZLIYA”
By that time it was too late to make it there, so the next day we drove to Herzliya, found “Optika Halperin” and went inside. We waited while the guy helped a lady try on several different frames and she hemmed and hawed in the small desktop mirror. Then finally they took us to the back room with the eye exam stuff, entered our ID numbers in to the computer, looked at our US drivers licenses, took our pictures, and surprisingly printed out a green form – one for each of us! We told her we didn’t think we needed the eye exam, and she somewhat incredulously said something like, “so that’s all you want?” We said, yes, thanks, and away we went.
The next step is to take the green form to the local DMV, where we entered the building the next day and tried to figure out the take-a-number machine. It was similar to the one at the bank, and unlike the simple US things where you just rip/pull the paper number thing off the roll, here it was like a little ATM machine with a bunch of different prompts so you could get a number I assume for the specific service that you required. We, of course, had no idea what to choose, so we just entered our ID number and pushed the top left button and were given a letter/number combo. When the number was called, we went to the window only to be told that, surprise – we were at the wrong window. But, no worries, she would just transfer our number back into the queue for the correct one. (at least that’s what i think she said). So we went back to the seating area. Then when our number was called again, we gave them the green forms, and again much to our surprise, she just printed us out two paper but official looking drivers licenses! (which are temporary, until your official card-licenses come in the mail in a few weeks? months? I’ll let you know….)
But, they are not yet valid until they are paid for. And of course, you can’t pay for them at the DMV where you just got them – you have to take them to the post office or to some automated machine at another location to pay for them. We looked up online the list of automated machines, and found one at another address again in Kfar Saba, so we drove over there. The address was for an outdoor mall. Very nice, cool coffee shops and stores, etc. And located somewhere around there, was an automated pay-for-your-drivers-license-machine that we were somehow supposed to find. Well, after asking a few shop owners we figured out that it was located inside the SuperPharm. So eventually we found the machine, entered our ID numbers, swiped our credit cards, and poof! Nothing. Some weird error message, not sure if it just wasn’t taking our cards, or our licenses just hadn’t updated in the system yet, or whatever.
OK. So much for our attempt to avoid having to go to the post office. The next day we went to the local post office, and again were faced with the annoying little ATM style take-a-number-machine, where we obviously got the wrong number in the wrong category, but again, the woman at the window was pleasantly able to recycle our number back into the correct category, and eventually I was able to pay the money in person at the window, and she simply printed us out two more of the exact same looking temporary drivers licenses except that if you looked closely you could see the word “tashlum” or “paid” written at the bottom. Whew! I’m pretty sure we’re done with that for now, until our real ones come in the mail.
In other news, we also bought a three month summer pass (six of them, actually), for the Ra’anana community pool. The first time we were there it was at night, very pleasant. The second time we were there we didn’t realize that it was separate swimming that day during the time we were there. Despite the oddness of it and the annoyance that the kids felt at not being able to play all together, it did seem nice to me how they are able to accommodate religious and secular and that everybody just seems OK with it.
