Driver's License

Midnight

After you have lived or driven in Ireland for about a year, you are supposed to get an Irish driver's license. For Europeans that is pretty easy: you turn in your old one from your previous country, pay 55 euro (for a ten-year license), and get a new one. Americans (and some other third-world countries ;-) are less trusted. Lee Ann will have to take 12, hour-long formal driving lesson's and then pass the test. The lesson requirement, even for experienced drivers like Lee Ann, was introduced last year mostly to ensure that young drivers had the proper training before they got into traffic alone.

My new license

Starting this January, new driver's licenses in Ireland look like mine above: A credit card size plastic document. Until now, the licenses were larger and printed on paper. My Swiss license I traded in, was also on paper. The Swiss have had the credit card style licenses for ten years now, but I still had the old one, since it was the last one I got in Switzerland before coming to the USA.

The back

When you go to the motor tax office here to exchange your European license, they look at a catalog on their computer to see if it matches the looks of the known license types from the country it was issued in. Mine was not in their catalog! They had to send it to the main office and it took a couple of weeks before they could assert its validity. A further complication was that it had no expiration date: Swiss licenses (at least back then) are good for life. Until a certain age, when you have to start going in for regular checks to make sure you can still sit upright and see.

My old Swiss license

In case you wonder why Midnight is at the head of this Blog entry: I was using my telephoto lens to take pictures of my new license. I put the license on a sheet of white paper on the floor and stepped far enough away from it to be able to focus. Midnight thought that piece of paper was meant for him and decided to lay on it.