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We got back from Denmark yesterday. We had fun, despite driving rain, indifferent waiters, and having to pay through the nose for everything (our poor battered dollar ... treated even worse in Denmark than it is in the Eurozone). Pictures, along with my commentary, will be coming soon -- in the meantime, you can read Shelby's writeup of the trip, if you haven't already.I managed to get yet another parking ticket during the two hours between our return to Hamburg and my taking the car back to the rental agency. I richly deserved it; I was parked in a no-stopping zone. Still, everyone parks illegally in our neighborhood, all the time; the legitimate on-street pay parking disappears completely around mid-morning, once business hours begin in the surrounding office buildings. The stretch of street where I was ticketed is always full of parked cars, every day, for as long as we've been here (and despite yesterday's length-of-the-street massacre, it's full again this morning). Some people just don't park on the street, either; they're blocking driveways or alleys, or parking with half of their car pulled up onto the sidewalk. Given the everyday brazenness of the Falschparkers in my neighborhood, why do the extremely sporadic parking-enforcement attempts of Hamburg's Polizei always have to coincide with the few hours that I'm a temporary car owner?Oh well. At least the last ticket was only 15 Euro. Maybe when I'm pricing rental cars on the Internet, I need to start figuring the price of the ticket into the total cost ...A mystery: While taking the car back to the rental agency, a convoy of very serious-looking police vehicles came speeding by in the other direction: two police cars, leading five armored vehicles (one of which reminded me of UC Berkeley's bomb squad truck; yes, my university had a bomb squad, thanks to the Unabomber), with two more police cars bringing up the rear. I don't see anything in this morning's newspapers that would seem to merit that kind of response, so hopefully it was only a false alarm or a practice exercise ... |
Those trucks are used for transporting large amounts of money, gold, etc.
Used banknotes and coines have to be transported from the banks to the Bundesbank and fresh banknotes and coines have to be brought back to the banks. That's what this was all about.
