It is literally impossible for an American to get a German driver's license. Oh, they'll let you sign up with a driving school and download the app and buy the book and study for months and take the test, but there's no way in hell you'll pass. The test is thirty questions selected from a pool of one thousand, and while they will happily give you all one thousand questions in advance, even with months of deliberation and conceptualization and rationalization you'll never make sense out of them.

One problem is that the "English translation" of the book you've bought is into Great British. Trailers are "caravans," people have "behaviour," and your car has "tyres" and does "manoeuvres." Sentences actually start, "You must reckon with....", which sounds like something Marshall Dillon would say to Billy the Kid. I want to answer, "Do I, pardner?"

I like this passage because it's so totally true. Is "muzziness" a word? Nowhere in the world. But I like picturing a German motor vehicle official sitting back and imagining, "So, when I take an Ambien, how do I feel? Tired? Relaxed? No.... Muzzy! That's it! Medications can cause muzziness."

Even ignoring the odd comma here doesn't help, since "reeve" means "the chief magistrate of a town or district in Anglo-Saxon England."

Google doesn't even help with words it agrees are real. For weeks I read about the proper behaviour in regards to "walking paths" and "footpaths." Don't park on them. Don't drive across them. I kept picturing Mercedeses zipping through forests when it hit me: they meant those cement walking footpaths we have in America. You know, we call them "sidewalks."

"Sunken kerbstones" also baffled me. I wondered about a country whose driving rules so heavily featured flooding. Don't give priority to cars at sunken kerbstones. Ignore cars at sunken kerbstones. Weeks dragged by before it hit me:

Driveway. Don't stop for cars coming out of driveways.

Every day I'd study more, and fume more about it. In America I'd regarded Germany as Valhalla, where everybody was smart and logical. And then I came here and realized the reason Germany was so highly regarded was because it was being graded on an EU curve. Not a genius? Less than brilliant? No problem. Just go stand next to Slovakia and Greece.

My irritation magnified over months of study, as examples of their idiocy piled up. I spent a few weeks puzzled by something called "dipped headlights." References were everywhere. In a tunnel, you must dip your headlights. When you see a deer by the road, dip your headlights. I started to think, are German headlights controlled by a joystick or something? And I'm a smart guy! An idiot would have assumed there was onion soup mix and sour cream involved.

I still don't understand the reasoning but I can repeat the facts: their "dipped" headlights are what Americans call "headlights," and their "main beams" are our brights. Dipping your headlights bizarrely means just turning them on.

Here's a life-or-death instruction about markings on the road:

I can't even understand who this is talking to. Will British people read this and think, "Righty-O, Guv'nah!"? Because Americans look it and go, "Whaaa?"

Americans might also take exception to the word "recommends." We'd be tempted to stop in the middle of the intersection, and when a policeman pulls up we'll say, "Well, the book RECOMMENDS stopping back there, but I decided against it. You know, it's like ordering the fish after the waiter recommends the veal."

Of course, if getting a driver's license is torture here, I'm pretty sure going to jail is worse.

The stakes get higher when buses are involved, so it's important to memorize this:

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? And then you come to this:

I was pretty sure I was missing something here. "Don't ever pass a bus flashing their hazards while approaching a bus stop. Wait until it's parked and children are exiting before you do." But then I noticed they use two distinct words: "overtaking" and "passing." According to people online, Americans think they're the same thing but Australians think they're different. I couldn't imagine defending that to a traffic policeman:

ME: "Officer, I'm from Cincinnati. I didn't dangerously overtake that bus, but actually carefully passed it."

OFFICER: "Oh, then that's cool. Have a great day!"

Similarly confusing is where you can park your car:

You can't stop "up to 10 meters" of a St. Andrew's Cross. Now turn the page.

Yes, you got it. In a "built-up area" -- you know, what humans call a "city" -- you can park five meters in front of a diagonal cross. But don't even think about stopping there.

The book also declares, "Parking is not allowed on a priority road outside built-up areas." In human-speak, this means "Don't park on the road in the country." I memorized this, and then I took a sample test which asked, "Are you allowed to park at the side of a priority road outside built-up areas?" My answer: absolutely not! The correct answer: of course!

It sent me running back to the text. Apparently when they say "Don't park on the road in the country" they mean "Don't park IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD in the country." What, did you assume they meant on the side?

I sat there staring at the book, struggling to process what I was reading. I'd spent six months deciphering their pronouncements only to discover they were facts any idiot knows. It's weird: everybody in Berlin speaks perfect English. I get two German words out of my mouth and they say, "Look, buddy, let's make this easy. Let's go for English, okay?" But then I decide I want to get a driver's license and suddenly they're all, "You want go putt-putt in motorcar?"

Whether they're incompetent and don't care or they're actively trying to keep Americans off their roads, the end result is that it's impossible for us to pass the driving test. It's a Catch-22: if you're stupid, you'll never figure out what they're talking about. But if you're smart, you could waste months trying to unravel things that are obvious to idiots.

One last example bolsters the incompetence explanation. Let's start with a paragraph from the official book.

And here's a question from the official quiz.

As you can see, I got it wrong. Apparently you need to "reckon" with taxis and beware of taxis and watch out for taxis and keep away from taxis but you don't need to show them "particular care." Like don't send them flowers or chocolate? Think twice about that shoulder massage?

Anyway, I hope you learned something. You can pass someone without overtaking them, you can park in some locations without stopping, and you can totally ignore people that you need to pay very serious attention to. It makes me think of relativity, and that Einstein himself would probably fail this test.

I'd like to say that frustration makes me more determined, but in truth I gave up. I stop trying to understand it and instead just memorized the one thousand mostly-useless questions and their corresponding nonsensical answers. And I passed the test. Now I just have to pass the driving test and I get to drive all over Europe.

I've got to say, I'm feeling seriously muzzy now.

I didn't have parents, and in my earliest years developed a combination of anger and cluelessness that would follow me throughout life.

When I was five, someone at my school suspected I was smart, so one day I was dragged out of class and told I had to take an intelligence test. I sat at a desk and some old guy showed me a drawing of a tree on a sunny day. I noticed the tree's shadow pointed toward the sun rather than away from it and thought, wow, what the hell is going on here?

"What's wrong with this picture?" the guy asked.

I shrugged. "Nothing," I said.

"Nothing?" the teacher asked.

I glanced at it again. "Nothing."

Obviously disappointed, the guy said we were done and started to write in my folder. I picked up my jacket and walked to the door before adding, "Buddy, if you don't know, then you're on the wrong side of that desk."

My neighbor has prostate cancer. I ran into him in the elevator the day he was discharged from the hospital after a four-night stay.

He doesn't speak English & my German stinks. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to say, "I hope you are feeling better. I hope the treatment you received was sufficient & the hospital staff caring. That sounds like an absolute nightmare but fingers crossed they can keep you in good health. We sincerely care about you."

Except I know the German for maybe three of those words, so I just said, "This is not good. Not good. Very very very not good."

He actually got mad at me. The words "Of course it's not good, you absolute moron!" might have been said. I wanted to explain that my German isn't good enough to discuss sensitive topics but that sentence alone would take me twelve elevator rides to translate & would probably end up as, "Best I no talk. Bye bye." I thought, wow, even when I mean well I'm screwed.

I fumed for a couple of days before I settled on a solution: a multipurpose preemptive German apology. "Hallo. Ich bin ein 68-jähriger New Yorker und mein Deutsch ist nicht gut. Für nette Worte telefonieren meinen Mann. Wenn du eine Pizza brauchst, bin ich dein Mann." ("Hello. I am a 68-year-old New Yorker and my German is not good. If you need kind words, call my husband. If you need a pizza, I'm your man.")

It is winter and in every German tree are clumps of mistletoe. I guess it's there all year round, but you can only see it after the leaves drop in winter. It grows in giant balls that are thickest at the tops of the trees.

In New York you pay five bucks for a couple of twigs, so of course I couldn't resist greenery that was more valuable than my education. One day while we were driving to a local farm stand I spotted a low-hanging ball, and I told hubby to pull over so we could get it. He jumped a small creek, crawled through a hole in a rickety fence, and waded through a muddy pasture to the tree. That night I attached a string of miniature Christmas lights and hung it on the balcony.

The next day our friend Evelyn came over to make gingerbread houses, and she said in Germany it's illegal to cut down mistletoe. I said it's a parasite that hurts its tree host, but she said it's protected like all wild plants.

"Do you know why there's more mistletoe at the tops of the trees?" she asked. "Birds eat the berries, which means there are seeds in their poop. Since they're always flying, that's where their poop usually lands."

She doesn't say why you're supposed to kiss under it. And despite her decidedly cold explanation, I still find it romantic. The next time we're walking through a forest and I see some hanging high above I still can't resist. "Hey, a bird pooped up there," I say to my husband. "Give me your face."

One night on our cruise my friend Mike got really excited about the evening's entertainment: a mentalist. He had to sit in the front row, and for some reason he'd put on a suit, which stood out among all the muumuus and flip flops. I asked him why and he said, "I had a really, really good friend, Rick, who died twenty years ago. He promised me if there was any way he could contact me, he would. And I've been waiting ever since."

I just about cried. Mike is a really sweet Southern man so this didn't surprise me, though his naivete did. "You want a medium," I said, "not a mentalist. A medium talks to the dead. A mentalist asks you to think of a number between one and a hundred, and two minutes later a chicken walks in with the number painted on its ass."

Mike was stunned. "Oh," he said. "So this guy can't talk to the dead?"

I shook my head. Mike's face fell as the realization slowly crushed him. He seriously thought he'd hear from his long-lost friend again.

There wasn't much I could, but I had to do something. "You should definitely talk to the guy, though," I said. "The skills don't seem that far apart. If he asks you to think of a number between one and a hundred, tell him, 'I will, but first do you see an older man near me whose name starts with an R or an L?"

Conversation with my fictional American husband.

FAH: "Hey, it looks like a beautiful day. Let's go have some fun!"

ME: "Great idea. What do you want to do?"

FAH: "We could stop by the flea market at City Hall and then have Aperol Spritzes by the park."

ME: "Oh, that sounds perfect. Will I need a jacket?"

FAH: "You'll be fine. If it gets too chilly, I'll keep you warm."

ME: "Aren't you wonderful? Okay, let's go!"

Conversation with my real German husband.

RGH: "Get up. At your age you need to move around or you will die."

ME: "Great idea. What do you want to do?"

RGH: "First you will use the toilet, then I will use the toilet. Then we will go out. When we come back, I will use the toilet, and then you will use the toilet."

ME: "Oh, that sounds perfect. Will I need a jacket?"

RGH: "Yes. It is not cold but you need something to absorb all of your sweat."

ME: "Aren't you wonderful? Okay, let's go!"

(Naturally I'm crazy about him.)

Opens today in France. I'm not going to see it but I'm curious how much sugar they needed for the top.