A German tourist visiting friends in Shanghai woke up 400 kilometers away in Huangshan, Anhui Province, after giving a local taxi driver the wrong address to his hotel, online media reported Thursday.
The tourist, Frederic Simon, who was studying in South Korea, came to Shanghai on November 9, according to a report on the news website West Net. After a night out at the bars Sunday, Simon got into a taxi at 6 am to take what he expected to be a 20 minute ride back to his hotel in the city.
Unable to speak Chinese, he showed the driver the key card to his hotel room, which carried an address in Tunxi district in Huangshan. Simon fell asleep soon after he got in the taxi and did not wake up until he arrived in the mountainous city at 10:20 am.
Simon, thinking he might have been kidnapped, told the driver to stop the taxi, got out and ran away. The driver, thinking that Simon had bolted on his fare, called the police, said Zhang Liping, a police officer with the Tunxi District Public Security Bureau.
The police determined that the owner of Simon's hotel in Shanghai had been giving guests key cards from the hotel's branch in Huangshan. Simon and the taxi driver returned to Shanghai together, Zhang said. The hotel owner paid the driver 3,000 yuan ($481) in compensation for the mistake.
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