It was my own fault.

Here’s the deal: you can drive on a U.S. driver’s license for six months in Germany (so if you’re here as a tourist, you can rent a car or whatever), but if you want to be allowed to drive after that point, you need to exchange your American license for a German one. The conditions of this exchange are set by agreement between the German government and the governments of individual States, not our federal government – so that, for instance, a licensed driver from Alabama doesn’t need to pass a written test to get a German license, while a driver from Connecticut does. (Texans, happily, don’t have to take a test, though we are required to have an up-to-date eye test.) If you miss the six-month deadline, though, you’ve got to get your German license the way the poor Germans do: by taking an approved (and expensive) driver’s ed course and passing both written and practical tests.

We have no desire to possess or even operate a motor vehicle here anytime in the near future, but we have even less desire to put in the time and money to get licenses later on in the event that having a car becomes a practical necessity. I, procrastinator that I am, had nearly let our six months run out without booking an appointment to apply for German licenses.

This is how we ended up on the boat.

Trying to book an appointment at the nearest Bürgeramt (that’s the local administrative office, a sort of one-stop shop for local government stuff like this) was hopeless at such short notice – so we took what we could get, which was an 8:00 a.m. meeting at a satellite office of the Bürgeramt of Spandau, the borough on Berlin’s far western edge. This office consisted     of a waiting room and two desks in a youth retreat center in the locality of Kladow, which is more or less as far away from – well, anything – as you can get and still technically be in Berlin.

We headed out at 6:00 that morning – the safest route (in terms of how much time would be lost if we missed a bus or train) took us into the center of the city and then on a 45-minute bus ride through quite a lot of nowhere. But after our (successful!) appointment, the timing was right for us to take advantage of one of the lesser-known features of Berlin’s public transit system: the ferry.

Though Berlin is landlocked, its public transit authority (the BVG) operates four ferry routes. Three run across the lakes in the city’s southeastern corner; the fourth is in the southwest corner of Berlin, where the Havel river broadens out into a wide lake, a large arm of which is called the Greater Wannsee. It’s this body of water that separates faraway Kladow from our own borough (and regions directly accessible via train and bus).

So we hopped on the ferry in Kladow and took the 20-minute ride (on a normal ticket, just like you’d use for a train or bus) across the lake. Partway through, I noticed a big grey villa just back of the shore to our right, looked up our location, and sure enough, it was the (in-)famous Wannsee House, the location of the 1942 conference that made all the Nazi leadership complicit in the so-called “Final Solution” – now a museum and memorial.

There’s something very Berlin about the whole adventure, from the realities of navigating German bureaucracy as a foreigner to the strangeness of poking into the far corners of the city limits, from the joy of lakes and rivers and verdure in a city of millions to the sobering memory of my adoptive home’s past.

It ended up a pretty good day.

-Ben