I realize they frown on visiting Israel where you live, but if you did, you would find that the majority of people are fluent in English plus Hebrew or Arabic, plus another language (Spanish, Russian, etc.) Of course, it helps that Israel has three official languages and a ginormous immigrant population.
Hostile
Yeah, “frown on” is putting it pretty mildly. 
I have heard that if I want to go, the immigration people in Israel will just give me a little slip of paper instead of stamping my passport. Very obliging folks.
Regards
Testy
Yeah, I took an international shipping class and got to read the rules about importing and exporting people and things from Israel. Pretty incredible stuff–IIRC, no person or thing that has ever been in Israeli territory for any length of time or for any reason may ever enter Saudi Arabia legally. With the exception, of course, of the Royal Family and any Israeli products they deem fit to own. :rolleyes:
ETA: FTR, when I flew to Israel from their only serious ally and back, they technically didn’t stamp my passport either–they give you a sticker. IIRC, you can decide whether to peel it off of the paper it comes on and put it on your passport, or not. (Better not lose that thing until you get home, though.) As for me, my passport is proudly (and gaily) wearing the bright orange sticker on the back of it, even today.
Hostile
Yeah, Israeli products and anything at all else they want to do. As they point out, the country is named for them. This irritates a lot of people.
Actually, that whole Israeli boycott thing is gradually dying out. When I came here in the '80s it was a big deal but not so much these days as long as appearances are preserved.
I’m glad the shipping courses have finally taken notice of this kind of thing. We used to get things in from Alabama where they had experienced a problem with delivery, looked at a map, and sent something to us for forwarding. “Y’all are much closer, see if you can get it there.” Mucho panic ensued. And then there was the time when they actually sent us the shipment for the Israeli defense dept.
Regards
Testy
Hostile
I know of a few people here that have been to Israel. Mostly the highly religious that have gone for a sort of pilgrimage or something like it. Aside from that, I’ve never come up with a good reason to go. One desert looks pretty much like another. I used to live in Cyprus and did like the Med though.
Regards
Testy
Well, I only saw it because it was a particularly illustrative example of the kind of homework shippers are supposed to do before they ship stuff out. It wasn’t any major part of the curriculum, and it was an elective class anyway, with nothing to do with my major. And if you think that everyone in the shipping world has taken that class, think again–several of my classmates already had experience in the industry. Kinda scary.
Not as bad as that Israeli defense department thing, though. :eek:
Hostile
Yeah, that was exciting. It was a super-scanner kind of thing and cost around a million dollars so we couldn’t just throw it away and act like it never happened. We had to scrape all the Star-stickers off it and send it back to Alabama. Likewise the ass-holes in shipping that thought it would be cute to throw a few (thankfully!) empty beer cans in some shipments. International shipping has a lot of issues that people just don’t seem to understand. It’s embarrassing to me personally, but Americans seem to be the worst about this.
Regards
Testy
Sorry to the sleeping Dopers for the hijack, but I’m dying to know–how did it make it through customs in the first place?
Hostile
My apologies likewise. But then that is what makes this place so addictive.
The scanner (actually a photogrammetry system) was intended for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and didn’t actually get checked. Customs had a look at the shipping docs which were OK, but didn’t open the crates. The thing was fantastically precise from a mechanical and optical standpoint and both my company and the local military had people clearing it through customs and making sure that some customs guy didn’t get inside and accidentally break the thing while looking for contraband. You should have seen the looks on everyones face when we did finally un-crate the thing at the customer site!
Regards
Testy
Many Westerners don’t know how far afield this sort of thing applies. It’s not only in the Muslim Middle East. For instance, no Israeli citizen is allowed to enter Malaysia, over here in Southeast Asia.
Heh, this whole thing reminds me of the lead-up to the Quasi-War With France, back around the end of the 1700s. France declared that it was illegal for anyone to do any trade in English goods, and pursued a very hard line on this. Apparently this included anything on an American ship that came from or was destined to England, including “An English handkerchief in the Captain’s pocket”, and the French Navy and their privateers began boarding American ships, declaring any ship in violation a shipper of contraband and siezing it. When we sent envoys to France to work out a peaceful solution, the envoys were told that they could not speak to anyone important until they first paid a hefty bribe.
As you can imagine, this went over about as well as a fart in a church over in the US, and a brief fight on the seas ensued, along with US and UK shipping convoying together under American or British protection (as far as I know, the Royal Navy and the US Navy never operated together, though they both independently fought the navies of the French Republic at the time).
OK, hijack concluded. 
Raguleader
Like I said, that’s what makes this place so addictive.
Regards
Testy
Brief addendum to hijack: This sort of thing contributed to a huge pro-war fever against France in the late 1790s. In John Adams, the historian David McCullough details how President Adams almost single-handedly prevented Congress from declaring war on Napoleon. He knew the fledgling US was still too weak to embark upon any such course and felt diplomacy still worth pursuing. If we HAD gone to war with France, Napoleon would almost certainly never have sold us the Louisiana Purchase like he did a few years later, and U.S. history would have been dramatically altered. I mentioned this in some sort of “little-known US history” thread.
Absolutely spot on. Thank Og for the older lady who lived in the apartment below me in Rotterdam. She spoke barely a word of English so I HAD to speak Dutch to talk to her. It was the only practice I ever got!
I Love Me
Yeah, it can get downright embarrassing if all you have is English. A lot (as in huge majority) of the people I used to talk with spoke English, French, Spanish and possibly one or two others, like German.
Regards
Testy
I remember an episode of the x files where Mulder and Scully went to Norway to investigate a ship that had vanished. So they hired some “norwegian” sailors to take them out to sea.
To hear those american actors gargle norwegian lines (they could possibly not have had any relation to the language) was both painful and embarrasing to watch. It sounded like someone had forced them to eat stale whale blubber and they were trying to say something whilst gagging. Who knows, maybe they actually did that to get more into character…
In conclusion, no, americans do not sound sexy at all trying to speak norwegian, they more evoke the euthanasian instincts than tickle any arousal senses.
Now where did I put that harpoon…
Mmm. I dunno.
But then, as a child I did encounter a girl who talked in this Mickey Mouse voice and was so scarred that I took steps to ensure that I never would sound the same. These days my voice is definitely lower and I do tend to talk from my chest as opposed to my head. Take that as you will. (and I’m a woman, by the way)
I often find that when I mistakenly say a word from the wrong language, it’s invariably from the last language that I struggled with. So say, I’m an English speaker, who is currently speaking Japanese daily. The last language I struggled to learn was Spanish. So my Japanese misfires are always from Spanish. My Spanish misfires are Japanese. They’re never from German, which I’ve known fluently for years, nor from French, which I spoke at an elementary level 20 years ago. My feeling was that languages I don’t know well all end up stored in the same pile.
Yikes, sorry for the zombie, didn’t realized I’d wandered into a 3-year-old thread.
No prob. Interesting post – hopefully anyone who wants to follow up will start a new thread and link to this one.
Closed for zombiness.