According to my instructor I passed my test to get my Level B, Automatic Transmission driver’s license.

To protect the examiner from having the living snot beaten out of them, they no longer tell you in person if you pass of fail.

I took a practice test at my driver’s school yesterday… I failed for having not slowed down 3 times where mysterious, tiny little streets have the right of way. We practiced for 30 minutes after the class.

Otherwise I had 26/31 points, 21 passes.

Here is how it went:
The examiner showed up a little late. She had to wait 20 minutes for her salad, she even said putain. (Putain means whore, but they use it like damn or shit here.)

I went into the office, gave her my form of identification. I checked out.
She and I leave her office, a dingy little building in the middle of a parking lot, and then she recites something to me about driving with respect, etc.

We pop off to the car and she gives me some instructions. My instructor from the driving school is sitting in the back, the examiner is in the front.

I tell her in my best French that I do not speak French very well, and ask if she could speak slowly. Lots of thank you’s in there as well.

My instructor is buttering her up I think. She is actually in a pretty good mood. She is clear and concise in her language, and uses hand gestures to indicate direction.

I turn left onto a street with a limit of 70, which soon drops to 30, and I get to 30 but shortly after, hit 35…ding, there goes a point.

In France we have priority on the right, and that is what got me on my practice test. She takes me to a neighborhood where I know there are a lot of them, I am vigilant, though according to my instructor, I did miss one that is well known to be difficult to detect.

Understand, the roads are narrow and not well marked. You have to look past the gravel to see the paint on the road that indicates if the intersection on the right is controlled with a dashed line (yield) or a solid like (stop) which lets me know the expected behavior of drivers approaching from the right.

We when went to a parking lot, and she asked me to park, rear first.
I fucking aced it. Parking is not my best skill. I aced it. SH ethen had me shut off the motor.

Then, they take the last 2 digits of your odometer and use that as an index for a series of 3 questions from a book of 100.

The first one I missed. There was a subtlety in the indicators of the vehicle that involved an indicator belt associated with the seatbelt that I did not understand the function of in this vehicle.

(Side note, you test in the school’s vehicle. It has a brake and gas pedal, as well as indicators and a horn for the passenger, normally your instructor, but on the day of the test, you r examiner. )

Question 2 pertained to the age that a child could sit in the front with a seatbelt only, 10, which I got. Yay, 1 bonus point.

Question 3 was fucking hilarious. It was very long and drawn out, full of words I did not understand and terminology I did not know. When the examiner asked me the question, and she asked me slowly, I looked ate her dead in the eye and said “wow.” She said “yes” in English, the instructor giggled, and she repeated again, very slowly, word by word, the question. I replied that I did not know.

1/3 isn’t horrible, a point is a point.

Now, since we got off on to a late start, I was not sure how she was going to handle the duration of the test. It is meant to be 1/2 an hour, we got started at 8:44 instead of 8:30.

We leave the parking lot. I keep driving fucking slow (30 kph is the speed in the city, that is 18 mph) and then the instructor and examiner keep using the word “terminate”

I am freaking the fuck out thinking that I got 3 dings on something which renders you failed. 3 minutes later and we are on a course back to the school.

I get out of the car, my instructor talks to my wife and I, and says with 2 thumbs up “yes” meaning that tin his humble opinion I passed. I can’t know the answer lest I get a fail and go into the office and beat the snot out of examiner…

I will now tomorrow morning.

I took somewhere around 450 practice tests for the written portion. I do not know the margin I passed by, only that 50% of the testing group passed.

I studied the driving portion best as I could, polished the pertinent French and slowly crumbled under the nervous tension. We live in a village with nothing. 300 people live here. There isn’t even a boulangerie or a Tabac. Getting to Bergerac is 24 minutes by car. I am effectively leashed to my wife until tomorrow. Today is day 205. Tomorrow is freedom…