How booking a ticket to Beijing can take 2+ days

I am going to China next week, and one should think that it would be easy to book an airplane ticket to China. Wrong.

I am going there for one week, including a job interview ;o).

I am flying Air China, which is star alliance member, and I found their webpage. I filled out everything (which is a LOT for this airline), and then in the very end it rejected my credit card. I tried with both my credit cards, still no luck. Seven times I tried ... (=4 hours). Not until the last time I tried I saw a VERY small notice on their webpage saying that the nationality of the credit card HAS to be the same as the nationality as the webpage I was visiting. Ok, I was of course visiting the Thailand version of Air China's webpage. So then I looked for a Danish version of the webpage (since my credit cards are Danish). They have an office in Denmark, but no specific webpage for Denmark. So I tried the Swedish webpage, still with the same result. Great....

Hmm, what to do then.

Well, I looked up the Air China office in Bangkok, so today - after going 1 hour with subway and after walking through monsoon rain for 30 minutes - I finally found the ticket office (Google maps sent me to the wrong end of a very long street, thank you Google).

I entered the office just to find out that they do not accept credit cards. Only cash. Which airline in this world has an official office selling airplane tickets which do not accept credit cards??? Any small bar even in Thailand accepts credit cards. But Air China does not.

The price of the ticket was more than I could withdraw from my credit card in an ATM in one day (you can only withdraw one time per day when abroad), so what to do? The only solution was to say that I come back on Monday after withdrawing every single day throughout the weekend. I hope it will not be raining again on Monday...

And so far I have not even mentioned the hassle of getting a Visa for China which I have also been through the last 2 days, but that needs to wait to another time ;o). But I can say that applying for a visa to China when you are NOT in your home country is not easy...