EUROPAN DIARY:Brussels isn't an easy place to learn how to drive for your average Irishman, writes Jamie Smyth.
I FINALLY got my hands on it last Friday. After two years of driving lessons, numerous near misses on the roads and hours spent studying Belgium's highly detailed highway code I passed my driving test and claimed the prize of a full driving licence.
My licence may have Royal Kingdom of Belgium printed on the cover rather than Ireland but at 35 years of age and after six driving tests (three in Belgium and three in Ireland) I can now drive on my own from Dublin to Dubrovnik if it takes my fancy.
Success didn't come without a price tag though. The €1,500 spent on lessons (€50 per hour) at my Belgian driving school is nothing compared to the grey hairs that sprouted up with each close encounter with a tram or gallop along a six-lane motorway.
Brussels isn't an easy place to learn how to drive for your average Irishman who, despite recent innovations in Dublin such as the Luas and the port tunnel, has little appreciation of Belgians' love of tunnels, one-way systems, spaghetti junctions and stifling bureaucracy.
First of all you have to deal with the fact that everyone drives on the right-hand side of the road and usually at high speed. That put paid to my first driving test in Belgium, which ended after three minutes when my tester had a panic attack and grabbed the wheel as I casually strayed on to the left-hand side of the road while daydreaming of home.
I put that mistake down to the rather eccentric approach to road markings adopted in Brussels, where the white line in the middle of the road regularly disappears and at each junction a forest of road signs appears where one sign would normally suffice. By the time you've been able to read the four or five signs (which you finally work out are all giving the same instruction) the impatient Belgians behind you are standing on their car horns.
On my second test I missed the round sign with the red outline indicating that only buses could use this particular Brussels road. That mistake resulted in a humiliating reverse back up the street and straight back to the test centre after just 10 minutes on the road.
Then there is the mysterious "priorité à droite" (give way to the right) rule. After 27 hours of driving lessons in Belgium this rule still seems to come down to which driver has the thickest neck and can manage to out-stare his opponent at intersections. Driving along a main road, it means having to slow down for routes that can seem as small as someone's driveway.
To make matters worse, on some main routes tiny road signs are erected (usually behind fast-growing trees) to indicate that the rule does not apply on this particular road.
Then there are the hundreds of finicky rules in the highway code, which all have to be mastered for the theory test. Belgians simply love bureaucracy and the English version of Driving in Belgium from A to Z runs to an excruciating 233 pages. I had to learn about everything from climate change to drug abuse to pass the theory test. Some of the strangest regulations are in the section dealing with alcohol and driving, a pursuit that ironically thousands of Belgian drivers seem to enjoy indulging in most weekends.
Under Belgian law there are two legal thresholds for drink driving. If a driver is over the 0.22 milligrams of alcohol per litre (mg/litre) legal limit but below 0.35 mg/litre then he/she faces a driving ban of three hours and a fine.
If he/she is over 0.35 mg/litre above the limit you face a six-hour driving ban, a fine and possible imprisonment. Confused? Well, the bottom line is that you need a great deal more than common sense to get past the Belgian theory exam. I took 10 hours of night classes at a cost of €200 to pass mine.
And of course it wasn't just me that had to go through all the stress of the test. Under Belgian law I had to be accompanied by a fully licensed driver on my test, forcing my badminton partner Tom to take time off work to live through every missed gear change and ignored signpost. He was a nervous wreck the third time around and was quietly threatening physical abuse against the tester and myself in the event of another failure.
But at 7.15am last Friday (driving testers start early here) Tom and I finally conquered the rush-hour traffic, onrushing trams, strange road markings and priorité à droite with some of the best defensive driving ever seen on the streets of Brussels.
Now, with my licence safely tucked away in my glove compartment, there is just one last thing to do: forget all the rules and drive like all the rest of the maniacs on the roads of Brussels.