Car registration

All Curacao residents need to pay an annual registration fee for their vehicles. Once the fee has been paid, drivers are given 1/3 of a license plate, to be mounted on top of their existing license plate. The colors of these additional plates are different every year. This helps the police department; they can tell simply by looking at your license whether or not you’ve paid the fees.

Fees are paid at a local bank, which keeps Curacao bank hours—closing around 3 or 4pm on weekdays. Banks are completely shut down on weekends. As I work during those hours, a group of the teachers hired a messenger to do this errand for us while we continued teaching classes. The new mini-plates are silver. A colleague told me not to mount mine yet because during the month of January, people are known to steal them straight off of your car.