Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Code de la route
Although I have long put off getting a French drivers' license (largely out of pride, being miffed that my American license is not recognised here), the fact that my wife was pregnant was a sufficient impetus to get myself in gear on attaining one. An endeavour which, unlike in the US, is both difficult and expensive.
Once the financial barriers of paying tuition to an "Auto école" are settled, the next step is studying to pass an examination on "le code de la route", or the rules of the road. This test is nothing like the cake-walks Americans are accustomed to (having taken written examinations in Iowa and Massachusetts previously). Instead there are 40 questions, of which 35 must be answered correctly to pass. And these are not the elementary questions one might expect from the American tests: they are often ambiguous, even for one with a perfect knowledge of the rules of the road, and the correct answers often hinge on linguistic nuances—"the markings permit me to pass", "I can pass", "I pass" (in the situation pictured)—which can only be correctly navigated once one has attained a great deal of familiarity with the examination itself. The exam is so difficult that many people require multiple attempts to pass it (each one preceded by still more expensive Auto école classes)—indeed Emilie has never met anyone who has passed it with a perfect score.
Until I got one today, that is :-)
Still, as happy as I am to have this achievement under my belt (I had to take a day off work to do it, after all), there still remain two more steps in the process before I have an official French drivers' license: more Auto école lessons (this time actual driving lessons, in a real car), and then the in-car driving test (which also places the bar a fair deal higher than in the States: the test lasts at minimum 30 minutes, whereas my US test barely lasted 5).
All the same, getting the written test out of the way is considered the lion's share of the task, and so having passed (and since I took the whole day off work anyway), I was happy to treat myself to an afternoon of Guitar Hero III on the Wii :-)
