I am now ready to tell the tale of the degradation that was my driving exam.  First an aside.  Italy is still a sexist country.  Women are very much considered inferior and are treated as such by most men over 50.  Italian women have learned to us their "feminine wiles" to get what they want.  When dealing with bureaucrats or men in higher places sometimes it's the only way to go if you are not up for a battle.  It took me 6 lessons with my driving instructor to figure this out.  The only way I was going to get him on my side was by stoking his huge and undeserved ego.  We had been butting heads for the past 2 months.  I don't like being treated like an idiot child by a chain-smoking, uneducated bore, and he liked to use his "power" over his students to make him feel like a big man.  Well it probably works just fine with teenagers just learning to drive by it didn't work too well with me.  I argued with him about everything and he'd yell at me and tell me I'd never pass the test because I didn't know how to follow the rules.  GP dared to say that I am not easy to teach!  Can you imagine!!  At our last lesson I decided I didn't need to win, I just needed to get my stupid license, so I did everything he said without making 1 snarky comment!  I got him talking about himself and his vast knowledge of autos, young people today and evidently life in the US where he's never actually been.  I smiled, I nodded, I laughed (at appropriate times).  If I were any younger I would have outright flirted.  So when we parted he was in high spirits, told me I'd do fine on the test (as long as I remembered all he'd taught me), and wished me a good day.  Up till this day we'd stomp off in opposite directions after the lesson.  The day of the exam, the owner(middle aged guy) and examiner(another middle aged guy) were waiting for me in the office.  They were having some little private discussion over a cup of coffee that concerned me because they laughed and nodded towards me and the owner said, "Ah, yes, our American lady!".  So all three of us got into the car and they immediately started teasing me in a belittling way about women's driving skills, (especially American women), and how driving for 35 years has made me impossible to train, (wink, laugh, laugh).  It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut but I just smiled and made comments like "well what do you expect?"  Obviously they had already agreed on a plan because instead of driving the typical route with parking exercises and hand brake practice, they had me drive them to the DMV to drop the instructor off at his car.  They quizzed me on safety distances and speed limits the whole way there, thought it was very funny to make me drive 10 mph over speed bumps, roaring with laughter as the instructor kept braking from his side of the car.  By the time we got there I was jumping out of my skin with ire, but I said nothing!  When we arrived at the DMV, the examiner got out of the car and handed me my license that they had already prepared.  Then the school owner told me to get into the passenger seat and he sped back to the office in half the time it took me to get there, breaking every rule of the road on the way.  Asshole.   xxoo me