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>>>Back when dinosaurs ruled the world and before cable, I had the night shift with our dog business and we had a Spanish language local station in Houston that played the Hong Kong Kung-fu movies dubbed in Spanish. At 5:00 am, when you're on your 2nd 24 hours, hearing spanish coming out of chinese faces would just skitz my brain.
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>>I know exactly what you mean. A few years ago I was in Quebec City and we went to a chinese restaurant. Our waiter was, of course, Chinese, but when he came over to our table and spoke, he spoke French. Clearly that shouldn't have surprised me, being in Quebec City and all, but it did. Context is everything, and I guess there were competing contexts in that instance. To this day, I wonder if he spoke French with a Chinese accent.
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>Even weirder - was he speaking French-Canadian with a Chinese accent? French Canadian sounds quite different from the original. I suppose it's equivalent to an American-Chinese speaking English.
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>Some years ago we arrived in St Denis, Montreal and stopped to get a hotel room for the night. The proprietor was Indian-Asian and we conversed for some time in French. After a while he asked where I was from. When I told him Brighton, England he revealed (in English) that he was from Shoreham, just a 10 minute drive along the coast from Brighton. Small world!

A friend of mine was on a flight to England and ended up sitting next to a Japanese couple. They didn't speak English, he didn't speak Japanese, but it turned out the husband and my friend both spoke Russian. He said it was an interesting conversation, particularly when the husband would stop the Russion, ask his wife a question in Japanese, and then continue in Russian.