A stories I recently remembered from our trip to China:

During one of our last days in Beijing we went to a large market where people were selling all sorts of stuff. As everywhere in such places, they often tried to warm us up for a sale by asking a whole bunch of friendly questions like “Where are you from?” I lazily replied that I was from Russia and my wife was from Brazil. The next question surprized me a bit more: “Do you speak Spanish?” Asking Brazilians and their spouses if they speak Spanish is one of those things that earns Americans a reputation for being just as dumb as their president, but in China it was more amusing than annoying. “A little bit,” I replied, without bothering to lecture her on the fact that Brazilians do not speak Spanish. “Can you help us fix this mp3 player, then?” was the next question. It turned out that while playing with one of the mp3 players that they were selling, they changed the language to Spanish. As is often the case with bad UI, there was no way to change the interface back to Chinese without knowing the Spanish word “idioma.” Luckily for her, she was selling her toys at one of the most popular markets in cosmopolitan Beijing, where one can hope to catch a Spanish-speaking Russian. I switched the idioma of the MP3 player back to 中文. They were quite thankful and didn’t even try selling anything to us.