JTB Poster Child Rocks Hamburg

[Mike Oxlong]

A railway station in Hamburg, Germany, was closed down and evacuated after a Japanese tourist left his bag there unattended, according to a local newspaper.

The man used a chain lock to attach the bag to a bench and left the station to go sightseeing, the paper said.

The police, suspecting the bag might contain explosives, closed the station for about an hour and a half Friday and brought in a bomb disposal unit.

Because the incident caused two train runs to be canceled and about 40 to be delayed, the operator of the railway is considering demanding that the man pay damages, which could reach several million yen.

[sublight]

Funny, just last night I saw a travel bag in Shintomi-cho locked to one of those streetside traffic barriers. Never noticed that until yesterday.

[Taro Toporific]

A railway station in Hamburg, Germany, was closed down and evacuated after a Japanese tourist left his bag there unattended...

[floatl][/floatl]Ha, ha, my father-in-law left his luggage in the entrance of Diversey Station on the Ravenswood Line for me to pick with the car during his visit to my family home on the Northside of Chicago. Nothing happened to his bags.


But hell, have done stuff like this all the time in Japan....

• Once I was lugging a 1.5m duffel bag full a books back from America and wanted to do a little shopping in Shinjuku. The bag would not fit in any of the lockers, so I just placed it on top of the 2m tall lockers where no Japanese could reach it. I got "lucky" and very drunk but I remembered the next afternoon about my bag. Sure enough, it was still sitting there 24 hours later.
  
• Out in the wilds of Shikoku, I stupidly asked the station mistress at sleepy rural train stop where I could check my backpack before hiking up to an onsen. She looked at me like I was crazy and said to just leave on any bench in the tiny station. At the onsen, some old farmer kidnapped me for drinking. TWO days later with a massive hangover I retrieved my backpack, which was still sitting on the bench where I left it.