Lets discuss parking in Europe for a moment. It's pretty hilarious as everything seems to be fair game, intersections, sidewalks, even on the road beside other parked cars. As it is Kiel Week and World Cup, there has been absolutely no parking near our hostel. Everyone is trying to park for free and walk downtown. I have been doing a fairly excellent job of parking our rental car in random tight places and intersections etc. and so far the car has always been there the next day. This morning however, it wasn't. We left the hostel with plenty of time to gas the car, return it and then walk to the train station (as the car rental place and the gas station are 500 m from the hostel and the train station is 3 blocks, this seemed like it would work out fine). Except then the car wasn't there. After a brief moment of panic and adrenaline, we quickly got to work. We walked to the police station (also only 3 blocks away) and a very nice police officer looked up our car and told us where it was. Thankfully in Germany instead of towing your car to an impound lot really far away, they just tow it to a street with lots of legal parking and leave it. All we had to do was find it! The policeman called us a taxi and we headed over to the street where are car was actually fairly easy to locate. There was a note in German on the windshield which we haven't managed to translate yet but it starts off "Dier Idiote" which even I can decipher. So we got the car back, gassed up, dropped it off and headed to the train station and caught our train with plenty of time. All in all it was an excellent result to what could have been disastrous morning.
We then spent the rest of the day taking the train to the Hague, which was intermittently boring and stressful as our first train got delayed and we nearly missed the transfer to the second train. We have rented a 1 bed apartment in The Hague for the next month. The landlord very kindly picked us up from the train station. The apartment is a 10 minute cycle along the beach boulevard to the marina, so we will rent bikes tomorrow and get acquainted with the city.
I have posted pictures from the German Naval Memorial Museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment