No hablar Espanõl

I am soon getting to the stories from my vacation in Playa Del Ingles, but first I have to share what happened in connection with the tickets we should’ve been using for our originally planned trip by the end of April. The trip we had to cancel because of my friend’s accident.

At that time we had booked tickets with Iberia to fly from London via Madrid to Las Palmas. By mid April when we realized that it would not be possible for us to travel by end of April I needed to contact Iberia to cancel our tickets. They were the cheap kind of tickets where you don’t get you money back, but I still needed to cancel them to get the money back on my travel insurance.

I thought contacting Iberia by email would be the easiest way to do this – but Iberia has no contact email listed; you need to call them. So I called their London office and got to speak with a woman who spoke English fairly well. When I had made her understand that I wanted to cancel our flight AND that I totally understood that I wouldn’t be getting any money back, I asked if she could be as kind as to send me an email to confirm that I had cancelled the flight. She could do no such thing. To get a confirmation that I had cancelled the flight I needed to write to the head office in Madrid Spain. I argued that I didn’t need anything as official as that, I simply needed one sentence in an email confirming that I had actually called and cancelled the tickets. No she told me, I needed to write to the office in Spain – then she went on to spell out the address, in Spanish!

I don’t speak Spanish, I know about 20 words or so in Spanish, and for some reason I seem to be pronouncing them so well that every time I use them to communicate with Spanish people the automatically assume that I actually speak Spanish and go on with many more words, that I don’t understand. As the cleaning lady at our hotel did on one of the first days when I gave her some money and said “for you” in Spanish, and she was so delighted to find that I could speak Spanish she went on and on, and I gave her the money with a bright smile and went back to the balcony! And as one of the taxi drivers that took us from Maspalomas to Playa Del Ingles also assumed when I said “Centro Commercial Cita Por Favor” and he said something about speaking Spanish “muy bien” and threw himself into this really long speech, and I had no where to run at the time so I just nodded and smiled.

Well, back to this woman at Iberia trying to spell the address to their head office in Madrid. I asked her if she would be as kind as to send me an email with the address, and she said, no this was not possible. Surely, Iberia’s employees must have access to email in their offices? Anyway, we spent the next 15 minutes going over the address over and over again, until both of us were fed up and thought that this will have to do. So, I sat down, and wrote a letter to Iberia, in English, including all the details about flight numbers, dates, times, airports and reasons for cancelling the flight and why I needed a confirmation and all sorts of documentation and I sent it in mid April. Since then, Iberia’s been quiet. By the beginning of May I contacted my insurance company and found that they don’t really need a confirmation from Iberia that I cancelled the flight so I went ahead with my insurance claim without the confirmation from Iberia.

Yesterday, finally, a letter from Iberia arrived. A letter which I’m pretty sure is also a very nice one; it certainly starts with “Apreciada señora Bakke” and this I understand to be quite a friendly greeting – as for the rest of the letter, that’s in Spanish too! You would think that Iberia, which by now also is a pretty international company, with offices around the world, would have someone in their head office in Spain who would be able to reply to a letter written to them in English – in English?

Oh well, as I said, I don’t really need it anymore, but I am curious as to whether or not this is the confirmation that I wanted, perhaps the letter states that they don’t give such confirmation, perhaps they ask for more information before they can send me such a confirmation, I don’t know. I am thinking about replying to it though, in Norwegian, and carefully explain to them, that I did not understand a single word in their letter, because I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH!