An American Tourist Drove Onto a Car-Free Plaza in Munich, Thanks to GPS
GPS directions have, once again, led a tourist desperately astray in a video gone viral.
Look, generally speaking, I'm a huge promoter of the phrase "dance like nobody's watching." Go off, be yourself, don't worry about what others might think, and who cares if someone looks at you weird! Sometimes, though, you might want to second-guess yourself—especially if people aren't really looking at you for being yourself, but for, well, cluelessly doing something illegal.
If you are driving on a plaza in a foreign country, and if you're the only visible car around, and if everybody else—aka the locals—is watching you looking very puzzled, it is very likely that you are not supposed to be doing that. And you guessed it, this exact episode really happened to a few American tourists in Munich, Germany, and it recently went viral on TikTok, amassing more than two million views.
"Everybody is staring," says a voice in the video, which is shot from the perspective of the American tourists inside the car. "Oh, it's OK," responds the family's father nonchalantly. In the meantime, the camera pans on the car window, showing the shocked looks on the locals' faces as they watch a car drive where it definitely shouldn't.
To be fair, it isn't all the dad's fault, who's sitting at the wheel. And this is also not the first time something like this has happened. "You said drive through that tunnel right there," he's heard saying in the video. But it looks like he isn't really talking to a person, rather to the car's GPS, which is what allegedly brought the family to the car-free plaza in the first place. And from the looks of it, the tunnel isn't really a car-friendly tunnel—if anything, it looks more of a shopping gallery. The family agrees. "What?! Drive through the tunnel?" someone frantically asks. "Go back where you came from!"
On the car's screen, the GPS is sure of its decision, and somehow isn't taking into account that it's a car-free zone that appears to be located in Marienplatz, Munich's city center. And while that didn't help, there were some clues that could've helped the family realize they were in the wrong spot. While foreign countries are difficult to navigate as they are and cultural differences are no joke, some things are universal—for example, it is very unlikely that drivable roads come with, say, in-road decorations. One person in the car, in fact, did notice that it is "weird to have a flower pot in the middle of the road," referring to a big decorative plant on the car-free plaza.
But everybody makes mistakes, especially when stressed and out of their comfort zone. Perhaps the real one to blame, here, is the car's GPS. The comment section mostly seems to agree. "Why would the GPS send you that way lmfaoo," one user wrote, racking up 26,000 likes. Someone else, though, pointed out that the reason the GPS did that was because the route was set to bike or walk. Or, as another person suggests, it's all a matter of what GPS system you're using. "That day he learned not to use apple maps and started using Google Maps."