09.22.06

I passed!

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:32 am

This morning I had nothing on my calendar except for one thing - my written driver’s exam. Unfortunately American licenses aren’t valid after one year of residency here. I am a little ahead of schedule, but figured I might as well get it over with.

Here, you have to attend driving school. So I attended class a few times a week. It was actually good language learning for me - a whole new set of vocabulary that I hadn’t ever learned. However, they recently changed the test to include other languages besides Italian. Since I’m a chicken, I decided to take the test in English. Since each time you take the test it costs €?50, I didn’t want to flunk because there was a word I hadn’t ever heard of.

British English is what everyone here means when they say English, which is really pretty different from American English. “In Britishen” (as Lance says) a verge is a shoulder, a motorway is a freeway, and a carriageway is a lane (I think). So even though the test was in English, I had to pay close attention to make sure I didn’t goof up something dumb because the word was different from what I’m used to.

But I passed! My driving instructor drove me to the office (they are required to attend), and waited while I took the fancy-shmancy touch screen test. He gave me the good news and took me home.

Now I have to pass the driving test, which should be easy since I’ve been driving in America for a while!

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