Chinese tourist loses wallet, becomes refugee by mistake

Source: The Local

Quite how the 31-year-old ended up spending over a week in a refugee home in Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, is not totally clear,broadcaster WDR reported on Monday.

But it appears that he has the German Red Cross (DRK) to thank for finally freeing him from his ordeal.

Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the smartly dressed man didn’t seem to fit in the refugee home, who knows how long he would have spent there.

DRK worker Christoph Schlütermann was the first to notice that the apparently wealthy man wasn’t your normal asylum seeker. But when he tried to communicate with the man, something got lost in translation. Even the use of hands and feet didn’t help the DRK worker come closer to understanding why the man was there.

Stumped, Schlütermann went to a local Chinese restaurant where they advised him to use an app on his phone to ease translation.

When he went back to the man armed with a German-Mandarin translation app, it soon became clear: the man wasn’t looking for asylum, he wanted to get to Italy and France.

“I spoke into the app in German and the phone translated it into Mandarin. But when I received his reply, I got the curious response ‘I want to go walking in Italy’,” Schlütermann told the Dülmener Zeitung on Sunday.

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