Will the Chinese fun never end?!

I finally bought my tickets to China the other day - this year I am going to fulfill a ten-year dream of going to Tibet. I arrive in Beijing on 10th August and leave on 7th September. Will be in Tibet roughly between 14th Aug - 2nd September.

So I look into cheap flights on the internet, and find one for 70,000 yen (£350) which is an annoying amount to pay to go the country next door, but not bad given this is the most expensive season (unfortunately the only convenient time for me to go this year) and other travel agencies were talking about 100,000 to 120,000 yen.

I phone up and ask about flights to Beijing, get transferred. I'm talking to the guy in Japanese and at some point I think I must have hesitated to think about something, at which point he says:

"hwarlepwhahla, fuwalamyupunghwalahwalaxiong ma?"

WTF? I'm thinking I must have seriously misheard something.

"Eh?"

"hwalamyowfwangshumwhalapyo, huarlexiaobow ma?"

And I'm thinking "you're not seriously speaking to me in Chinese, are you?"

"Errr... I'm not Chinese...", I say.

"Oh. What nationality are you?"

"English."

"Oh. I can't speak English."

"Well, shall we carry on speaking in Japanese, then?"

Later, I go to the shop to actually buy the tickets and meet the same guy. He says I was transferred to a line specially for Chinese people, so that's why he thought I was Chinese. Indeed there were a number of boisterous Chinese employees, answering phones with a verbal abandon that you would never hear from a Japanese customer services person.

He looks in the database for the cheapest seats, and since Pakistan Air is all booked up, the next cheapest option is Iran Air. Great! Fly to a communist country on a terrorist airline! That's why it's so cheap...

I give him the go-ahead and he looks at my passport (which as a foreigner you need to show when you buy tickets for anywhere outside of Japan). He got a bit confused between the surname, forename, middle name and nationality lines: he thought my first names were "British Citizen."

Having clarified my name, I pay and ask whether Iran Air is a reliable airline (it only flies once a week, so if they cancel, it's pretty inconvenient for me). He reckons it's unlikely to happen, and while the planes are a bit old they have a decent enough safety record. (Yeah, right)

More importantly he says the reason why many Japanese don't like to travel on Iran Air is because they serve smelly food on board. That again is something a Japanese employee would never say.


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I'm actually being a very bad employee, googling details of Iran Air's safety record and posting on this blog from the office (hey, I have nothing to do, okay?)

I just got a weird cross-lingustic shock, as my Japanese boss said something to me about going to eat food from Fiji, and I heard "feiji" which means plane in Chinese, and froze as I thought he was commenting on my illicit internet activities. Even though he doesn't speak Chinese. Tuh! My guilty conscience will get paranoid in several languages, it seems.