(The concept seems outdated, and I've successfully rented cars abroad without an IDP at all. Also, isn't it weird that authority to issue these is delegated to AAA, and them only?)
You get used to it after a few minutes. It takes a bit more concentration, especially when turning out of one-way streets, but it's otherwise fine.
There are mutual recognition agreements between many pairs of countries. The UK, for example, will allow you to directly exchange a licence from an EU or EEA, a British Crown Dependency, or a 'designated country' (Andorra, Australia, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Japan, Moldova, Monaco, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Republic of North Macedonia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe) for a British licence with no need for a retest. Most of those countries drive on the 'wrong' side of the road.
Really though, the actual driving part is pretty easy to pick up. You get accustommed to it quickly. You're more likely to have problems crossing the street on foot (you'll look the wrong way for traffic) than driving.
This is something to learn the very first time when getting into a (new/unfamiliar) car before getting the vehicle moving.
Come to India and drive a few cars from different brands. [1] The rule is to drive on the left side of the road (so the driver is on the right side of the vehicle). But the sticks/levers to turn on the windshield wiper may be on the right side of the steering wheel or on the left side (and vice versa for the turn indicator sticks/levers), depending on the manufacturer. If you don’t check it in advance, you may end up wiping the windshield when you want to signal a turn or end up signaling a turn when you want to get water off the windshield.
[1]: Actually, it’s not recommended for foreigners to attempt to drive in India. The traffic is chaotic and one needs a different way of thinking to drive.
Having lived in Germany for five years, this is a total myth. The German administration is a tire fire, I mean a filing cabinet fire. First lesson is: learn to wait. Have to do things at the municipality or the Finanzamt? Prepare to reserve 1-2 hours of your day, because you will have to wait a lot. And then the administration is pretty chaotic because (for historical reasons) they do not want to link administrations. Then they do random things like accidentally changing your and your partner's tax brackets in the middle of the year. My wife (who is German) chased them until they would fix it and they had no clue how it happened. Other foreign colleagues often had similar issues.
The same is true by the way with non-government stuff like medical care. Have an appointment with your GP or a medical specialist? Great, the appointment only means that you have to be there at a certain time. They will let you wait an hour or two without any remorse (what's the point of an appointment)?
Nothing is efficient in Germany. Reliability is also a meme at this point. Even 10 years ago, about 1/4-1/2 of the ICE trains I took would have a serious delay (which usually ended being a 2-3 hour delay if you have to cross a border). We just came back from vacation in Germany (it continues to be a beautiful country with nice people) with our electric car. The charging infrastructure is deplorable. Not only they have only a small number of chargers available (even a lot of highway stops only have two chargers), so impossible to charge on a busy day. But not only that, a lot of chargers are broken and nobody really cares for fixing them.
Sorry for the rant. tl;dr: Germany is not efficient and not reliable.
Honestly never seen this issue in any other EU country.
German health system is a mess, but mainly because Germans are (probably rightly) suspicious of having electronic health records.
You can do it via the local embassy/consulate where you might never find an appointment, and sometimes there's a deadline for doing all this. Or you travel to your home country multiple times and hope you never forgot one document and have to start over.
Or you pay sometimes a lot of money to a company which does this for you with less stress and maybe even cheaper than doing it yourself.
Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.
Fun story:
Once I was traveling to a country X that I was familiar enough with to know that thir governmental services web sites were awfully designed. We're talking about web design that would easily put Geocities to shame.
They had recently introduced an eVisa scheme that I have to complete.
Out of tirednes and being in a rush, I clicked at the wrong link. It gets me into a shiny, modern web page with nice graphics and a form to complete.
I instinctively think "WAIT! This is TOO nice for an official site!".
Then I look at the address bar, see an obvious scam-SEO URL, realize my mistake, and go back to search for the real one.
Which was as terribly designed as expected.
I don't know how there is an excuse for this that's acceptable to any authority. It's their own platform that they seem unable to control.
Take some responsibility Google, you are profiting by facilitating evil (even moreso than by regular advertising).
Unfortunately there are no incentives for Google to fix this. Apparently they make too much money out of it.
The thing I don't understand is why people keep expecting them to. Who even wants Google to be the police? To actually act as a deterrent you need the ability to impose penalties, and for that you need the actual police.
All Google can do is close their account, and then there are no real penalties so they just make new ones until they figure out how to beat the fraud detection system.
And if you try to impose penalties on third parties for not being able to solve a problem they're structurally unable to solve, all they can do is crank up the false positive rate and mess things up for innocent people.
Stop even asking for this. It's a dystopia. Put the actual scammers in prison instead.
Sometimes they would also submit the forms / get the response back for you, which could be a real service in places where normally you would wait for a couple hours in a governmental office just to submit a form.
Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
If their SEO ranking beats the official site, they could confuse the hell out of people. (And I am told people do not use uBlock or Pihole everywhere, so paid ads would work, too.)
They seem to leave the market, perhaps due to being sued they cannot make a profit: https://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/themen/kauf...
Visiting the US from the UK I used to have to fill in the green "Visa waiver" form, but it was free, short, and blanks were handed out on the flight in. Now I must file an ESTA ahead of time and pay a fee. Visitors to the EU and UK (and even between the EU and UK) will have similar advance paperwork.
It feels like a huge step backwards with very dubious advantages compared to the unwelcoming "fuck you pay me" feel of the encounter. There's nothing I like more when choosing a holiday destination than filling in a multi page bureaucrat-designed form and paying a fee for the pleasure.
A minor blip in the greater scheme of things, but it saddens me.
dhsysusbsjsi•4h ago
avh02•2h ago
excluding all the time i'd have to spend and documents I'd have to collect