Long story short: I’m (24M) American, and I’m visiting my long-distance Romanian boyfriend for the first time soon. In Romania, most cars are manual - including all the ones owned by my boyfriend’s family (I’ll be staying with them). I’ve never driven a manual before. His dad told me he can give me a quick lesson, and that I’m welcome to use their cars if I want; otherwise, I can rent an automatic. I don’t have access to any manual cars here in the U.S. to practice on, so I’m not sure what to do.
Generally you are allowed to drive whatever you could at home. Since US licenses allow you to drive a manual you can drive a manual even if you never had. By contrast if you are from a country that makes the distinction you can’t drive a manual even if you have been practicing (how?) and just need to do the final test to drive a manual. (I’m not sure how someone without a manual endorsement would go about getting it in such countries, but whatever that process is)
I don’t really think there’s any “generally” here: It differs quite a bit between countries. I believe in some countries they won’t allow you to drive a manual unless your license specifies it (i.e. an American license isn’t valid for a manual).
The US doesn’t have licenses differentiated for automatic or manual, well, none of the 8 states I’ve lived in anyway, so there’s no way for Romania to know.
No it’s pretty general. Check out the following international treaties:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention_on_Road_Traffic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Traffic
As a benefit of these treaties, if I so chose (and we’re rich) I could even ship my car to Europe and just drive it around (up to 6 months) without really doing anything! It doesn’t need to meet most any of the EU car rules either.
Now if I tried to permanently import it, I’d have to make modifications like light colors and such to make it legal.
But really for visitors the rules are pretty lax. You need an international driving permit which is really just a translated license.