Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Amused by Clueless Travelers

Well we are back in the US, thankfully without having to run through airports to catch our connecting flights like we usually have to. On two of our flights though, we had some interesting neighbors.

From Lahore to Abu Dhabi on Etihad, we sat next to an old Pakistani man who didn´t speak any English and was deaf. It seemed it was his first flight, as he had no idea how to buckle the seat belt and seemed totally intrigued by the food. When he got to the butter packet, he opened it and started eating it with a spoon!

From London to Boston on American Airlines we had a South Indian couple across the aisle from us. I have no idea how they made it to London. They were trying to put their buckles on backwards, and the man was standing up and trying to talk on the phone as the plane was getting ready to take off. The stewardesses could not communicate with them at all, so I tried talking to them in Hindi. Turns out they only spoke Tamil, but they could at least understand more Hindi than English. Either that or my hand motions were enough! Thankfully the man had the same model of phone as I do, so I was able to turn it off before getting him and wife properly buckled in. The stewardesses gave us drinks on the house for the translation help!

2 comments:

tanya said...

Welcome home!

Smorg said...

Welcome back to the USA! And you keep running into interesting things everywhere! :o)

Gosh, I hope he didn't form too harsh an opinion of American food based on those spoonfuls of butter... But then, when I and a few friends went traveling in Southeast Asia back in '95 one southern gal did sort of the same thing when we were served sushi on the airplane... She thought that the wasabi was actually avocado. It wasn't pretty. ;oP