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.
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.
It is, in fact, very easy for them to tell whether you license specifies that you can drive a manual or not. If it doesn’t say anything, then it doesn’t qualify.
That’s exactly the point: If there’s no way to differentiate, the country is free to say “welp, that’s your problem. Your license doesn’t specify manual, so no manual for you.”