The spider

On 11 Mar 2009, a car was parked in the gate of the Mission Home, Mission Office and Chapel. (All three enties share the parking and building.) The car was parked there at 10:30 AM.

Our little car was able to squeeze into the gate, but our Van (Voldwagon Transporter) would not negotiate the turn. The Office Elder's tried and almost got the van wedged between a tree and the gate. They finally found a parking place on the street for the van.

At 14:30 Elder Anderson and a two Ukrainian elders walked up the street to the police station to ask to get the vehilce moved. They said that unless we had a sign on our gate saying "No Parking" that the car was legally parked and there was nothing they could do.

I (Charles) called Kornelia and Gangov (our Building Mainteance Office), and after a lot of talk, Kornelia said that there was no such law and that she was going to call the tow truck (spider). Which she did. (Spider is what we call the "truck and lift" that picks up the cars and loads them so handily onto the bed of the truck.)

I watched the car for the 15 minutes it took them to get there. They had to back the truck down our street to get to the car. Two policemen were there. Elder Anderson paid the tow truck driver 15 Leva and it took them about 5 minutes to hookup, loadup and drive away with the car.

What gets me is that they park on the sidewalks and walk in the streets and drive the wrong way on one way streets and all kinds of other anticks and no one says a thing. We get tickets for the darnest things but no one gets sited for the above. Then we have someone blocking our only entrance to the Mission Home and that is OK! Go figure!