Driving

My husband and I had two completely different stories about taking our driving tests.

The first story is mine and it’s an unhappy one. In Korea, people have to be at least 18 years old to get a driver’s license. Getting a driver’s license is pretty similar in Korea to getting it in other countries. There is a written test and a road test.

As soon as I turned 18, I applied for my driver’s license test. When I asked for advice, two of my friends who already gotten their driver’s licenses told me that I didn’t need to study anything because the written test was very basic theory about driving. I trusted them without a doubt, and I didn’t study anything. Inevitably, I didn’t pass the written test, and I complained to them. I felt betrayed by them because even though they studied before the exam, they lied to me to look cool. When I applied for the driver’s license test again after 5 years, I studied hard for the test and passed both the written test and the road test with good scores.

The second story is my husband’s and it’s a better one (I personally think he got lucky). My husband got his driver’s license in Canada in 1994. After passing the written test, he took the road test. Because it was rainy, he was very nervous. He made several mistakes, such as passing through a yellow light, stopping over a line, and not stopping at a stop sign. After less than 10 minutes, his instructor told him to return to the starting point. After arriving, there was silence while the instructor was calculating his score in the car. By the way, just to back a little bit, while my husband was still taking the road test, the instructor suddenly shouted and then got embarrassed. He shouted because he thought my husband wouldn’t pass the test due to the score he already had lost from his mistakes, which was when he decided to return back to the starting point (in the middle of the test), which means he didn’t even let my husband finish it because he thought he had already messed it up. However, fortunately, my husband got just enough points and barely passed the test due to the instructor’s mistake. It’s likely that if the instructor had allowed him to keep going, he would have made more mistakes and failed.

My husband and I had conflicting experience, but now we try to drive safe and have driven without getting into accident up until this point.