After mishearing his drunken passenger's slurred directions to his home, a German cab driver ended up taking him to another country, The Local reports.
The 27-year-old German passenger was quite inebriated when he left a nightclub and got into a nearby taxi, instructing the driver to go to "nach Hause" (home) in the the nearby Herzogenrath area, regional newspaper the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reported. However, the cabbie misheard him and thought that he had said "Hauset", a village in Belgium almost two miles across the German border.
It was not until the driver arrived in Hauset that the drunk passenger redirected him, and after taking him all the way back, the cabbie presented the confused passenger with a nearly $100 bill. With no cash to pay the costly fee, the man got out of the cab and staggered inside his home. He is now facing charges of fraud.
Another German taxi passenger, however, had much better luck after a rather unlucky cab ride home late last month after accidentally leaving a bag containing more than $34,000 in the backseat of a cab.
"I was totally perplexed and surprised, that people could carry around so much cash and then forget it," the Würzburg-native driver, Thomas Güntner, told the local Main Post newspaper.
The cash belonged to an elderly couple who had gone to the bank earlier that day, and as Güntner predicted that they needed the money much more than he did and losing it may mean their "downfall," he drove back to their house to return it. The woman was waiting at the door with tears in her eyes and told the local paper that she was "still shocked" even after she'd gotten her money back.
"She was as white as a sheet and told me that I saved her life," the taxi driver said. Though he refused a reward, he did accept the $17 fee for the fare it cost for him to drive to their home.
