:)As I write this to you all, I am in a pretty good mood.  As well as having some quality time with my son – my immediate relative, I feel that I have managed a decent time with the locals.  If you have not ever spent much time as a foreigner – which I think is okay by the way, it may seem as though I am making a big deal of a small matter. 

From this perspective it seems like a big deal.  All it was, was an hour and a half at a local driving school in German.  Each time I attend I feel a little more present; I get a little more aware of the other students – most of them are barely older than my own child, and the teachers.  I do learn both about driving here in Germany and the German language as well as locals. 

One major difference I’ve noticed, aside from cobblestone, is that there are a lot of German roads that have no shoulders.  There is a lot of wind in North Germany, and so, that will matter a lot.  Stay inside the lines or you run a serious risk of flipping your car.  Whoa.  Big difference.  There are roads with shoulders here in Germany, so, that’s a road characteristic well worth paying attention to. 

As far as quality of driver…I felt I was able to be a competent driver in the USA.  I do not feel like I was …that lady race car driver…Know what I’m getting at?  I can drive reasonably well; luckily I am not the nightmarish ‘bad woman driver’ but at the same time…I’m no driving ace.  I have wanted to drive in Europe but at the same time I really noticed that I felt an intense upsurge of anxiety about it.  I know why: I really did not know all the different rules.  Lots of the rules are the same but even the thought of taking a wild guess on interpreting a road sign at 100mph is enough to make me feel like up-chucking.  No one wants to find out they were dead wrong 3 minutes after having guessed at what a road sign means while driving in a foreign nation.  That was what made me so nervous. 

There is a lot of wind in North Germany.  This is even more of a big deal in light cars or on roads that don’t even have shoulders.  The Germans are a little strange in certain ways….In a village one does not go fast, but between towns they let people go at speeds which I only experienced as ILLEGAL over in the USA.  So, you can see why ILLEGALLY fast by American standards in windy weather on a road with no shoulders is something that may require a little special preparation to be able to do.  Wow.