British Drivers and Your German Word for the Day
Recently I have been learning bits and pieces of interesting German language by reading the news. This is much more fun than the standard school textbooks that tell you things like "Wo ist der Bahnhof?"
My favorite news-German word so far has been Ampelmännchen or "traffic-light man"!
But second-place now goes to Einbahnstrasse or "one-way street." Why? Because of the following silly news report from a British paper:
If there were a contest for the title of "most stupid fans at the World Cup", two England supporters in Cologne who mislaid their car ahead of tonight's match against Sweden would certainly be in the running. The fans parked their car in Cologne's old city and, before going off to have a drink, they wrote down what they thought was the German street name. When they returned several hours later, they could no longer find their car. According to this morning's German press, the unnamed England fans, who had driven to the Rhine city from Belgium, then approached two police officers and handed over a crumpled piece of paper with the street name on it. Unfortunately, however, it read - "Einbahnstrasse", the German for one-way street. German officers this morning said they had to carry out an "intensive search" before discovering the missing vehicle in a nearby side street. |
*Giggle!* Hilarious!
Well, it is an understandable mistake, but . . . If you are going to drive in a foreign country, you should at least learn the road signs!
And here are a bunch of online German dictionaries, for fun, including a website for German traffic signs and useful traffic vocabulary (yes, you can see Einbahnstrasse there too).