First thing I think of when I look at the hed I just wrote is to be sure I spelled “license” correctly. The British, and I work at a British-language newspaper, spell license one of two ways. To “have a document which allows you to do this, that or the other” actually is a “licence” in Brit-speak. Well, of course it is. Why make it easy?

Anyway, this is a story about getting a UAE driver’s license. (Let’s stick with American usage.) American visitors here can rent cars and drive around, but if you have a “residence” visa you can’t even rent a car here, legally. You certainly are not supposed to drive.

Now, I’m legal.

And how did my day at the Abu Dhabi version of the DMV go?

Actually, it went just fine.  Nothing like the forgot-to-make-a-reservation nightmare that is a visit to the DMV in SoCal. (It’s quite a different situation, there, if you set up an appointment.)

The biggest work came beforehand, and it was something of an ordeal. Didn’t help that I was dealing with instructions from almost two years ago, which detailed the situation as it was then … as opposed to now. (Passed on from a good guy named Bob Garten to a good guy named Nick Stout and then to me … the only one of those three still at The National.)

The instructions that I had indicated that I needed …

1. An official translation into Arabic of my California driver’s license. Which entailed a visit to one of the 1,000 “official” typing shops in Abu Dhabi. We expats need a lot of paperwork, and the typing shops do translations and can be found all over town.

2. Four mugshots.

3. A “no objection” letter from my employer. In Arabic. This says that the sponsor of my visa, in my case, the newspaper, is OK with the concept of me having a license. We need “no objection” letters quite often. As I recall, we needed one to open a bank account locally.

4.  A photocopy of the photo page of my passport … as well as a photocopy of the residence visa page of my passport.

5.  My California driver’s license.

6. A national ID card or, failing that, a copy of the document indicating that I have applied for one.

7. 200 dirhams, or about $54.

So getting all that together was the hard part. Took me months, in fits and starts. The ID card, alone (and more about this later), requires finding one of a handful of authorized translation shops which can handle X amount of documents and can set up an appointment with the federal government to actually go to the ID office (in a suburb called Musaffah, a Dh30 cab ride from here) . Basically, just getting the ID card situation moving takes out big chunks of at least two days.

The “no objection” letter also can sometimes take a week to get, at the paper, and it also expires within a month or so. I’d had one already, but it expired, so I got another …

And the basic translation of the license can be a half-hour, and the four mugs … I had to go across the street from work and let a guy take passport-size photos and wait for them to develop …

Anyway, it’s all of that part of it that is difficult.

The final process, once you have all those things, is actually quite easy, at least as I found it, and as others who have recently gone through this will say, too.

Catch a cab to the local equivalent of the DMV (a few miles south of where I live), walk upstairs, take a number, tell the receptionist where your license is from (makes a difference which side of the room you then progress to), then wait for your number to be called and approach the open clerk.

She asked for various documents, and I handed them over. Yep. Got that. And that. And that.

Turns out I had several things no longer needed. Mushots? Don’t need ’em. No objection letter? Don’t need that either because, I’m thinking, the ID card came with one, and if you have proof that you’ve applied for one (they take months to arrive), the no-objection letter is redundant. But the rest of the stuff, yeah, they wanted.

This part of things took about 10 minutes. (I had waited about 15.) The tricky part was when the woman asked me “where do you leave?” I had her repeat it, and thought perhaps she was talking about how long my visa is good for (three years). But, no, she wanted to know where do I live. (All we do here is translate English into English.)  And then I mispronounced the Arabic name of the neighborhood, and she corrected me, and moved on.

The most annoying part was the “no mugshot” part of it. I’ve written before about how I now am encumbered by official documents with some of the worst mugshots in documented history … and I thought the vaguely acceptable mugs I had carried with me to the DMV would mark a small reversal of this. However, that camera fixed on her desk wasn’t there just for show … and she took a new mug. I had come wearing a ballcap. At least I had shaved. But I was in no condition for a vaguely flattering mug, especially once the ballcap came off, and she took my picture … and then asked me if it was OK, turning her screen so I could lean forward and see it. (At least they offer the chance for a do-over.)

I said something like, “Well, not much you can do with that …” and she was unclear on what I was getting at, and all she needed from me was an “OK”, and I gave her one. (I was not going to get a better mug from running my fingers through my hair a bit more carefully.)

Oh, and a thing about glasses. I have driven with them for several years now, and in California they take your mugshot with your glasses on if you can’t read the eyechart. Here, they did not object when I whipped off my glasses for the latest horrible mug, nor did they check my vision. I guess they live in the realm where “if you can’t see well obviously you will wear your glasses,” which is rational but perhaps not a great idea.

She then sent me off to make a copy of the document showing I had applied an ID card (now there’s an ugly mug), and I walked around for a bit looking for that, and then I was charged Dh1 (27 cents) for that, and returned with it to the same woman, and by then my card, with the silly mug fixed on it had come out of the oven.

I took it, said thanks, stuck it my wallet on top of my California license, and was back on the street 30 minutes from when I started.

So now I can legally join the vehicular mayhem that is “driving in the UAE.”

A great day.

Oh, and the license is good till February 12, 2021. Have I mentioned this is an optimistic country?