He does not think it is funny.
Okay, I’ll bite: What does it mean?
It is “hello” in Japanese. Sorry, I thought that was common knowledge.
Is this random advice, or does it relate to something that happened in real life recently?
I had to go get my visa the other day.
“Hello” in several languages, though for some reason Chinese isn’t one of them. Courtesy of the Warners.
on preview
Oops. Are they going to let you in? Or have they given you a trespass warning for China?
Ni Hao!
I’ll have a Grape, thank you.
Radar, is that you?
cf’75
Meh. I was hoping it translated phonetically to something outrageously vile in Chinese.
At any rate, you should not greet the Chinese Consulate General at all, as it is a building and not a person. Save your ni hao’s for the Consul.
I used to work with several Austrians at a ski resort. You’d be surprised how many educated people think Austria and Australia are the same country. I used to know an Austrian girl who had a sweat shirt that read, “Greetings from Austria, We do not have kangaroos!”
I don’t get it. If it’s common knowledge, why did you use it when speaking to someone who is Chinese?
Have you considered a career as a Chinese Consul? You seem to be lacking the exact same humor. 
I once emailed the Japanese embassy in London about a spelling error in Japanese, on their website which had a basic introduction to Japanese. Not that I could speak Japanese, I was just testing an application I wrote that writes out numbers in different languages (you know: nineteen hundred thirty-eight, the stuff you need in some legal documents), and had come up with something for which I could define neat rulesets for different langauges. So I wrote a ruleset for Japanese to see if that’d work, and then looked up this website to test it with. I had only one mismatch, and couldn’t find an error in my ruleset.
His reply was slightly less humor-less; he replied that I was correct, but I did not win a prize.
This reminds me of being at camp when we had a visiting counselor from Switzerland. One of the other counselors asked him, “Do you call your language Swiss or Swedish?” He hesitated a moment and then said, “We call it German.”
In what way was it a clever joke? I’m sure that the Chinese consul thought he was simply another ignorant American.
If you were an American consular official overseas, wouldn’t you be as annoyed with a question about whether Americans in Texas walk around bowlegged in ten-gallon hats with six-shooters on their belts?
Don’t they?
OK, I have to admit that the first time I visited Texas (after having grown up in Connecticut) I was kind of expecting to find lots of cowboy hats and good ol’ boys driving around in pickup trucks with gun racks and steer horns on the hood. And oil derricks everywhere. But when I’ve been to Texas, it’s generally been to relatively cosmopolitan areas, like Johnson Space Center in Houston, suburban Dallas or Austin, and it’s not so different from the real world.
Konichiwa is “good day” (used from about 10 am until sunset). I think part of Muad’Dib’s joke is about the fact that currently, Sino-Japanese relations are at an all-time low (but not low enough that China’s going to give back that $30 billion or so that they took in aid from Japan thirty years ago). It’s kinda like saying “zdravstvuite” to an American diplomat during the Cold War.
I’ve lived in Texas for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen steer horns on a vehicle. Lots of trucks and SUVs, and the very occasional gun rack, but the only time you’re likely to see anyone in cowboy hats is when they’re going out on the town, like to a bar. Most people wear billed (baseball) caps if they wear a cap at all on a day-to-day basis. This is the same whether it’s cosmopolitan areas or small towns.