Oddly enough

Oddly enough

Chinese tourist ends up in German refugee home

BERLIN

A Chinese tourist who lost his wallet in Germany signed the wrong paperwork and ended up being placed in a refugee home.

Christoph Schluetermann, an official with the German Red Cross, which runs the home, told news agency dpa recently that the man “set machinery in motion that he couldn’t get out of.”

The unidentified man’s troubles started in early July when he lost his wallet after arriving in the southwestern German city of Stuttgart. Officials have figured out that, instead of going to police to file a stolen goods report, he somehow ended up at an authority that presented him with an asylum application.

From there, he was sent to Dortmund in northwestern Germany and on to the refugee home in Duelmen. “He simply did what he was told,” Schluetermann said.

Schluetermann said he quickly noticed the man because “he was different from the others — very, very helpless.”

With help from a translation app and then from a translator at a Chinese restaurant, it became clear that the man wanted to travel on to France and Italy, not seek asylum.

It took German officials 12 days to put the story together and send the 31-year-old tourist on his way, Schluetermann said.

Prosthetic leg found in beaver dam, returned

WABENO, Wis.

A Wisconsin man has his prosthetic leg back after the lost limb was discovered sticking out of a beaver dam by two canoers.

Elliot Fuller and Jason Franklin spotted the leg while paddling between a pair of lakes near Wabeno in Forest County on Thursday, the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reported. Fuller said they were convinced it was part of a corpse until they got close enough to pull it out.

“I was sure we had found a dead body that someone dumped into the creek,” the Germantown man said. “We thought it was real at first until we got a closer look.”

A quick search on Craigslist yielded an ad from Mark Warner, who lost the prosthetic limb when his own canoe tipped over during a July fishing trip on Range Line Lake in Wabeno. The 49-year-old from Green Bay said he rescued his fishing gear and cooler, but the prosthetic limb got away.

“I wasn’t overly worried about it because I use my older model for fishing and hunting,” Warner said. “It wasn’t my everyday leg, to put it that way.”

Fuller and Franklin found the limb 3 miles from where Warner lost it. They returned it to Warner on Friday, netting a $50 reward for its safe return.

Associated Press