The Czech school of driving

After years and years of holding out, and scrounging lifts from my parents, I finally took the plunge and decided to learn how to drive. This was something I had already flirted with in my native Scotland. But alas, I had made no more progress than locating where my mirrors were and stalling my way slowly around a country cul-de-sac or two. My mother has a conspiracy theory that British driving instructors can at times be somewhat ponderous when it comes to actually teaching their students how to drive. My experiences at the hands of my full-throttle Czech instructor couldn't be more different...

I have been told by Czech friends that what I have experienced in this country behind the wheel is very far from typical - and indeed a few have suggested that I might find a less high-octane instructor. But I am in turns quite enjoying, and waking up in cold sweats about, my action-packed lessons. The first one consisted of cruising (or rather jolting) around Prague's main transport hubs for a couple of hours, being screamed at not to steer 'like a girl' and crank it up a gear or two. I have been learning to drive in Czech, which is becoming progressively easier, now I am familiarised with the Czech phrases for 'get out of the way of that tram!' and 'that's a pedestrian crossing, you fool!', which it took me a couple of lessons to master. For a Brit, there is also the tricky notion of 'přednost z prava' – giving way to those on the right, which is generally, but by no means always, denoted by a yellow square-shaped sign. I don't know that this concept even has a proper translation into English, so foreign is it to my fellow countrymen. I am trying to combat the ignore-it-and-it-might-go-away approach that I have so far taken to this phenomenon.

Hill starts were covered by our second lesson. And learning to edge right up to the person in front's bumper, in a really intimidating manner, was a basic requirement of my driving teacher's course. I have quickly become accustomed to the Czech for 'what do you think your doing, you idiot?', and 'are you blind?', alongside many other choice phrases favoured by my not-so-softly spoken teacher and directed at fellow motorists. This is all perhaps quite useful colloquial Czech to know, though I may quite justifiably fall victim to a road-rage attack in this country, should I ever reproduce any of it myself.

Driving in downtown Prague is a million miles away from pootling about the backstreets of my native Scottish village. And as scary and chaotic as it is at rush hour, I really quite enjoy it. When behind the wheel, I am somewhat blinkered, unable to think beyond the next right or left turn, or one-way street. I am still not yet sure how people actually manage to get from A to B without someone telling them the next turn-off they need to make, or the next lane that they need to shift into. But from what I can see of the city around me on such occasions, well, for a start it looks great, with all of the twinkling lights and billboards – some instructive, some downright distracting. And the angle that you see the city from is so very, very different - on those rare occasions that I think about anything other than my white knuckles clinging to the steering wheel, I think about how strange and good Prague looks from three feet off the ground.

Still, it remains to be seen whether I will ever actually be able to join the ranks of Prague's fully-fledged drivers, or whether the scary boy-racer techniques I have been picking up from my rubber-burning instructor will stall my plans to whizz about Prague and beyond.