learn how to drive stick-shift

Learning is easy. Find a friend with a manual transmission car and ask for some lessons.

To really perfect it though, you need to drive in traffic and so forth for a while in a variety of conditions. It isn’t hard, it is just something that gets easier and easier the more you do it (like most things), until eventually it becomes like second nature. You won’t need to think about what you are doing, and you will never forget, like riding a bicycle.

BTW, if you visit Europe, chances are your rental car will be a stick. Easier to just learn how to drive a stick and be able to drive anything than to take the chance that they might not have ANY cars you can drive on the rental lot (because they only had two or three with automatics, and they’re already taken).

I dunno, I really don’t even think about it anymore, so I don’t mind driving in traffic.

It’s pretty easy to get the basics down, it just takes some practice to get smooth and to not roll back too much on hills. Once you drive around in stop-and-go traffic every morning for a year with a stick, you won’t even think about it anymore. It’s like riding a bike.

Really, the main reason to learn it is so you can simply sit down in any car and drive it. Also, if you rent a car in a foreign country, sticks are generally more common.