Theoretics exam and my birthday

The last two weeks have been exhausting, as I’ve been focussing a lot on my theoretics driving exam and my birthday. In fact, it has been so exhausting that my physical resistance went down and now I’m a bit under the weather. I think I’ll be fine if I just rest up a bit though. Fingers crossed.

Let’s start with the thing that was the most nerve wrecking for me: my theoretics exam. Some of you already know, but here’s the result: I PASSED!!! YAY!!! I never expected for me to pass this exam the first time! I thought I would need a second time for that to happen. I did make a few mistakes, but still, I passed!

I got to say though: I don’t think I would’ve made it if I didn’t have an individual exam. The whole exam there was a lady sitting next to me to assist me if anything about the exam wasn’t clear to me and to help me silence the nerves. In the first part of the exam I had to look at a situation and say whether I would need to slow down, stop or do nothing. While practicing this on my computer, the text of the question (“What do you do here?”) distracted me a lot from the situation itself, causing me to lose essential time. Of course, this wouldn’t happen in real life. Text from a question wouldn’t distract me. I would simply assess the situation at hand.

Because of this I was very stressed out. I didn’t think I would make this part of the exam and was told beforehand that I wouldn’t be getting extra time for this to make up for the text-problem. This felt unfair to me, as it wasn’t exactly the same situation for me as it was in real life. During the exam there was a great surprise! Apparently they removed the text, as the question would be the same for each picture anyway so I would understand that, and I could concentrate on the picture alone! This helped a lot and suddenly the time wasn’t as much a problem as it was before.

The rest were questions on general knowledge and they DID give me extra time for that, as the first part of the exam already tested my response time. The second part of the exam also had more text in the questions, so I really needed the extra time to really understand what was being asked of me.

This was great! Finally I could calmly read the question, allowing me to quickly respond with the answer afterwards. When I was sure about my answer, I would tell the woman sitting next to me and she would continue to the next question.

This was a great way of still making sure I have the right knowledge and the right response time on the road, but also keeping in account that I take a little longer taking in information. This calmed me down so much, I didn’t panic and the answers came more easily to me. This just goes to show how much understanding and adapting is needed. Of course they needed to make sure I would be safe on the road, but within these limits they made all the right adaptions. It really helped!

As for my birthday; I don’t have much to say about that. It was a lot of fun! We went bowling (where the music was loud, but not too loud) and had dinner at a restaurant (which wasn’t really all that bad, but I know of better restaurants… I won’t be going back there). I’m not that great at bowling as I don’t do it that often, but I had a personal record (70) which I’m proud of.

I had some great presents too! There were bento stuff (Japanese lunchboxes), money, birthday cards, some sweets, etc. Thank you everyone! Next to the bowling and the restaurant we also played some games and had some of my home-made cookie sponge cake. I was very proud of that cake, as everyone responded with a ‘hmmmm!’

On the day of my actual birthday I had a driving lesson, where I got some Belgian chocolates from my driving instructor. Later that day I had physical therapy, where I got a backpack with some goodies in it for my birthday. Thanks to the both of you! It’s very much appreciated!

So yea, I had a lot to celebrate. It was a lot of fun, but it also took a lot of energy out of me. That’s why I’m only writing about it now. It was all worth it though!