Inconsistency

I never blog about my Amsterdam and Berlin trip, but there is one fact about Berlin which I find amusing.

We rented a SmartCar for the 3 days we were in Berlin.  Needless to say, we got to visit a lot more places with the SmartCar and had so much fun with it.

Our second day with the car wasn’t as delightful.  It got towed while we were hanging out inside the dome of Reichstag.  You can probably imagine how freaked out we were when we couldn’t find our car in a country where we can hardly communicate with the locals!

The Reichstag staff didn’t know where our car got towed to and told us to speak to the police. After a lot of walking, we finally found the police station. We spoke to at least 3 policemen and none of them could tell us where our car got towed to and how we can get it back. As ridiculous as it may sound, they told us to go to this other police checkpoint which was another 10-minute walk from where we were.

After some more walking, we finally found some other policemen we could talk to. I can’t tell you how happy I was when one of them actually speaks English well. He told me something so funny that I still couldn’t believe it’s true. What he said was there isn’t a central place to hold towed cars in Berlin. When the city tows a car, they instruct the drivers to just drop it off a few blocks away. In other words, if you are up for it, a little treasure hunting can save you about 250 Euros!

You probably can figure out the end of the story by now. After burning a hole in our wallet, they gave us the address of where our car got dropped off at and it really was just a couple blocks from where we parked it…Thanks Germans.

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