A Full Day of Wedding Preparation
Can you imagine?
May 7, 2002: We hire a car for the day from "Cordner's" Rental Car. Cordner also operates a bed and breakfast in town; it's a bit disturbing maybe to stay there, because it looks more like the sign says "Coroner" instead of Cordner. No matter. The rental costs US$45, which given a taxi to the Inland Revenue Office (where you get your marriage permit) is TT$400 round trip (about $66). Add a few bucks for gas and you've got transportation for the day. The car is an old Nissan compact, it's got 214000Km on the odometer, some rust on the side. There are salsa music cassettes littered all over, a pair of sunglasses, some skin cream... this is somebody else's "regular" car.
Tobago's
roads are mostly paved, some have some pretty impressive potholes which
instead of repairing, they paint while stripes around them. Forewarned
is forearmed, I guess. We don't have any trouble being swallowed up
with potholes or even driving on the left. Again, the time in Thailand
has changed a lot of things for us.
A large portion of Tobago's small population gets around by hitchhiking. We don't want to invite trouble by picking up a potentially "bad element", but we see a well dressed, single woman, and invite her. She's off to a class in Microsoft Office in Scarborough (which is where we're headed). She directs us right to the office we need to go to, and she walks from there to her class.
At
the Revenue office, we meet at the appointed time with Mr. Jordan.
Jordan is meeting with a couple of locals — Rastafarians, and their
conversation, while ostensibly in English, was incomprehensible.
Mr. Jordan bids us welcome and sets us down in chairs apparently reserved for this purpose. He invites us to read the letters of thanks lining the walls, from other happy couples he's provided the paperwork (and sometimes the marriage service) for. Perhaps this mitigates the TT$300 cost for the "special license".
There are just two forms to fill out. One decrees that we're marry-able,
it takes our
marital
statuses and occupation: "Bachelor, Retired Engineer" for
Scott, "Spinster, Management Consultant" for Kathy along
with names, temporary and permanent residences, Mr. Jordan helps us
fill in the documents. Then after we pay the fee, he painstakingly
transcribes our information to the second form. We think that the woman
we picked up and dropped off for her Microsoft class, could do all
of this with a word processor in five minutes (we were at the Inland
Revenue office for about an hour) — but where would the tradition be
with that?
We were admonished to bring our passports, birth certificates, and plane tickets with us — Ingrid suggests that we can get by without the birth certificate. A web site Kathy'd dug up said that we'd need a letter from an Attorney, stating that we were in fact single (but we saw no mention of this in any official documents).
In reality Mr. Jordan looks at none of our papers. They're not even mentioned.
Bachelor Retired Engineer and Spinster Management Consultant left the office with our permit. We hit the biggest grocery on the island (it's on the end of the island with the airport, so about an hour drive from our hotel — but just a few minutes from the Inland Revenue office), and got some additional stuff for our picnic and to eliminate our dependence on the Blue Water's restaurant. We haven't eaten there since. Filet Mignon. Ripe Mangos. Chef Boyardee Tortellini. Nothing but the finest.
Next: The Thing Itself