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12:00 AM
Then it comes down to convincing the airline, and that is much simpler if you're free of doubts :)
 
Does the agent at the check-in desk as if I have a visa?
or do they only care if my passport is valid or not
It does say on the Iraqi Embassy website that people of Iraqi origin who have foreign passport don't need a visa to enter Iraq
 
Then you should be fine. And you have an ID to show that you're of Iraqi origin.
 
Yes I hope so cuz last time I travelled with a different airline and they didn't ask anything. I'm just a worrying person, especially my flight is in 2 days so I don't have enough time to do anything
 
The agent at the check-in desk may check for a visa if they know that British citizens normally need one. But if you tell them that you're an Iraqi citizen as well, then they should be content (or inform you that you're misinformed)
 
What do you think if I check-in online, would that save me the trouble with the airline?
 
12:06 AM
Unlikely, since they'll still have to check your passport when you're dropping off your checked luggage.
 
I just hope there won't be any problem. Thank you for your help anyway :-)
 
To me it sounds like it should be fine (don't forget to bring your convincing smile). Safe travels!
 
12:25 AM
Um, I'd actually suspect you being born there has no bearing - they follow rules - eg do you have documentation
eg, I was born in South Africa. I have NZ and SA citizenship. But if I'd not kept my SA citizenship, it'd still say 'born in South Africa' on my NZ passport.
So if you're only showing them your British Passport, they have no reason to believe you're still an Iraqi citizen
The agent at the checkin desk usually checks for a visa, as well as proof of onward travel
if you tell them you're a citizen, they'll want to see documented evidence of taht
but yeah, call the embassy, and they may give you a solution or letter or something
I'd consider asking this as an actual question on travel.stackexchange.com
as others may have more time to research it on your behalf
 
 
2 hours later…
Doc
2:34 AM
hmm.. it's a pity he didnt ask that as a question rather than just here
'cos that was i could have given him the right answer, rather than the completely wrong one like you guys did
but hey, whatever :)
 
3:16 AM
who you talking to? Jonas and I seem to have different answers ;)
cool, I now have the silver badge for now. Didn't know it went up like that.
 
Doc
4:11 AM
Iraqi nationals can get into Iraq based on the fact they were born there/used to live there
which is not uncommon for refugee-style countries, as people often leave the country without proper paperwork
 
4:26 AM
ah, an exception to normal rules, nice!
 
4:41 AM
@ManFire - if you come back, we really do suggest raising it as a proper question on travel.stackexchange.com for others and your benefit - Doc seems to have an answer that is more accurate and useful for you, and for anyone else in future that happens to come across this!
they're far less likely to find it in the chat, hidden between sordid stories of old socks and naked urls
 
Doc
naked urls?
i can't talk - i just finished taking photos of my feet...
 
 
2 hours later…
6:23 AM
let's see...if memory serves me, yep, I have no idea how far back it was
ah here we go:
Oct 3 '11 at 9:31, by hippietrail
hey that would actually make a good t-shirt. i should typoize it this way for best effect: "naked gurls good -- naked urls bad"
long story short, around September/October last year, @hippietrail was leading a campaign against 'naked' urls - just eg links that look like yadayadaya instead of a proper 'bunch of words' that you click on.
 
6:51 AM
@jpatokal - calling jpatokal ;)
re your comment being deleted, the comment was:
"Three problems there, my friend: 1) Converting to Islam is not that easy, especially if you prefer your penis without bits chopped off. 2) Even if you are Muslim, you have to apply for a visa in the Hajj lottery, and the odds are pretty steep. "<contd>
<contd>"Egypt has 80 million people, and gets a quota of ~80,000 visas a year: that's 0.1%. 3) Last but not least, a Hajj visa allows you to visit only Jeddah, Mecca and Medina, and that for a limited period of time; you're not allowed to leave and explore the rest of the country!""
it was flagged for claiming that to convert to Islam you need your penis chopped off(!)
I may have been hasty in deleting it after some research - at first glance it looked like a 'make fun of religion' comment, although according to answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100226120338AAlFFcu it's not a requirement of converting in most countries.
I guess really there are three problems - 1) if history is anything to go by on this site, it'll perhaps cause conflict just mentioning it, but that shouldn't be a reason to delete 2) it's becoming chatty and off topic - and once it's no longer travel related it should be in the chat room and 3) thinking about it now it should actually be in the answer itself, rather than in the comments
I'd consider adding it into your answer - perhaps minus the chopping bit since that's unlikely to be something anyone would consider as a traveller, and presumably only affects at maximum 50% of the population, and keeping the rest as it's really interesting.
it's a tricky one, but hopefully that's the least-likely-to-cause-conflict and yet still-very-informative solution
 
7:22 AM
Thanks for rescuing that, I've moved that back into the answer -- but it was fairly rude of you to delete that in the first place without even bothering to notify me.
 
7:36 AM
FWIW, I think @jpatokal's comment did not warrant to be deleted. Point 1 was perhaps phrased in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but it did not need to be deleted.
 
8:10 AM
morning all
 
Morning!
 
8:46 AM
looking forward to turkey?
 
Totally! One year is waaaaaaaaaay too long for an internship. Can't wait to get this over with.
Also getting a tattoo this month. :D
 
9:42 AM
design?
i designed one years ago but the more everybody has one the less i want a "me too" tatt d-:
 
@jpatokal - we get a ton of notifications and occasionally make a slip up. There's no instant notifier to tell you a post of yours has been deleted (I wish there was, would make our roles a lot easier). Furthermore it was flagged as offensive by someone else. I've explained, and even done my best to make amends :/
@AnkurBanerjee, agree - it's getting frustrating the whole religion getting mixed up in travel thing
the number of flags for 'offensive' with regards to Muslim, Islam, Israel, Palestine etc etc posts is just frustrating :/
let alone the comment chatter
and @hippietrail - totally agree, although I can't get tattoos anyway, I'd bleed too much :/
 
should we add explicit rules about religion and flagging to our FAQ?
 
I've thought about it in the past, but I don't really know how to word it without causing offense to someone
 
It feels a bit like wearing a t-shirt with a corporate logo I can never take off, except instead of a corporation it would say "Back when I got this tattoo I thought XYZ was really cool".
should you bring it up as a meta topic?
 
9:57 AM
do you say no flagging? because then what if something really is offensive? clearly someone took offense to @jpatokal's post, flagged it, but if we don't know enough about said religion, are we expected to research every complaint?
possibly. Might write it up carefully tomorrow, it's 3am now and I can't sleep, so not the best time to do it ;)
geez, you Aussies causing trouble in NZ: stuff.co.nz/national/7466544/… ;)
 
it's probably sydneysiders d-:
maybe we should lay out guidelines for what is and isn't offensive from our POV?
 
@hippietrail I'm getting ε››εδΊŒ tattoo'd.
 
42? Geeky!
 
Yep. 42. :D
 
well we could just let it ride - I gather 3 offensive flags on a post gets it autodeleted, or something like that
 
9:59 AM
gawd it's a whole list of unruly aussie tourists! see now why i seek destinations without them? (-:
 
haha
you're just spreading across the world ;)
 
YOU are an unruly Aussie tourist.
 
I still quote an American from Boston: "Aussies are like cockroaches, they're in every hostel"
OOPS!
 
one of the tattoo joints here has han character tattoos in their display which are back-to-front!
 
that was the WRONG time to accidentally hit enter
 
10:00 AM
@AnkurBanerjee: yes but what does it mean?
 
42. Like Mark said.
 
i heard an aussie voice here the other night and had to lay low
 
Although to people who can't read I'm going to tell them it means "chicken soup"
 
@AnkurBanerjee: you missed my reference! d-:
 
It's a reference to HHGTTG, but is problematic because as the answer to everything, it was actually the wrong question.
wasn't the right question 8 x 7 or something?
 
10:02 AM
sometimes i avoid getting drunk when overseas just thinking about the number of times i've had to cringe when seeing other aussie tourist doing stupid culturally ignorant shit
 
Nobody know the right question. There's a joke though that the question is "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"
@hippietrail Eh, Aussies aren't the worst. Pretty close to the top though.
 
you were supposed to say "it's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything"
 
n HHGTG, a massive computer was built to answer the Question. The computer spent millions of years calculating, and arrived at the answer "42". The problem, it said, was that the Question had never been formulated. The computer then designed another computer to calculate the Question. After millions of years of calculation, this computer was inadvertently destroyed. The last remnants of the computer were only able to provide the question "What is six times nine?"
6 x 9 = 42
(in base 13, at least)
 
many countries are just as bad when they travel in groups, especially to tourist traps in poor nations
brits and germans in spanish and turkish beach resorts, aussies in bali, americans in cancun ...
 
I dunno, I mean it's not fair to every Aussie, but the tours of them are notorious
even the Aussies in Spain
La tomatina was like a war zone, busloads of Aussies passed out on the street
 
10:05 AM
at my hostel in sydney we have the most trouble with irish guys, english guys, and then probably kiwi guys ... but that's only because aussies don't stay with us very often - aussie football groups and bachelor party groups are totally the worst but it only happens once or twice per year so doesn't make the top of the list
 
Us Kiwis are innocent, you're probably just seeing Aussies with a more NSW accent ;)
Ankur may have seen my tweet about that last week
I was talking to a colleague about Top Deck tours
they heard "Top Dick tours"
 
Hahahahahaha yeah I saw that
 
Top Deck saw the tweet too
 
That was good. :D
Oh did you get fired?
 
nah we had to kick out a kiwi guy that everybody liked who played innocent with us and we even lost a staff member over it
 
10:08 AM
favourited, retweeted and replied to me - apparently many of their Kiwi staff have the same problem
Nah with the colleague when I saw her confusion I switched accents and fixed it ;)
 
Hahahahaha
 
@AnkurBanerjee - from the mods support: "Delete the post. Suspend both users, and then randomly suspend a user that wasn't involved at all, just for the kicks of it. Brag about it in Teacher's Lounge, mission accomplished. "
 
Who flagged it in the first place?
 
can't remember, can probably hunt it down
 
i have to say there are plenty of culturally clued in aussie backpackers out there too, and it's always a pleasant surprise to meet those ones
@MarkMayo: it's important to mention the names of the two computers: #1 "Deep Thought", #2 "Earth"
 
10:17 AM
yes, one of the most awesome and well travelled girls I know is from Young, NSW.
well I didn't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but then, we are all geeks ;)
 
I like it when lurking users pop out of nowhere and write long, authoritative answers. Feels nice. :)
 
you mean the french highways one? :)
 
wow, some other mods are harsher - "My personal opinion is: "when there is doubt, there is no doubt". If something is offensive toward group of people then it should be removed - plain and simple" - so if anyone flags something, they'll just delete it.
 
I would leave it simply because it's factually correct.
I do not see what is offensive about it. Also, the mod tools interface doesn't seem to allow to see who flagged it.
If it gets into a comment-fight, then delete yes. But otherwise it was a perfectly correct factual answer.
* comment
 
10:25 AM
I assumed it was factually incorrect (my bad) - if it wasn't part of the religion, someone could take offense to a comment about hacking off genitalia. Of course, I don't know enough about Islam to know this. Heck, half the Israel v Palestine arguments have had me reading pages on Wikipedia just to know what they're talking about :/
yeah, I'd love to be able to ping the flagger and ask them now what their issue was
 
You can see flag history in individual profiles, but cannot track it down from mod tools itself.
 
yeah
If I had some prime candidates I'd go looking, but not sorting through a few hundred users ;)
ok well 3.30am, I'm going to have a go at trying to sleep again
got to get up in 4 hours :/
night!
 
night!
 
my connection has gone walkabout it seems
mark and ankur - post on meta suggesting an enhancement to the dev tools
 
Yeah, doing so
 
10:42 AM
noice (-:
 
You and your goddamn weird smileys.
 
bah it's you egocentric northern hemispherians who are weirdly upside down d-:
hmm what's the antonym of "antipodean"?
 
Cephalopodean?
Nickelodeon?
 
11:05 AM
Podean?
 
11:45 AM
0
Q: Antonym(s) for "antipode" / "antipodes" / "antipodean"?

hippietrailWiktionary says these terms refer to "the opposite" side, etc and offer no antonyms. But in practice, in the field of north vs south hemispheres, they are only ever used in my experience to refer to the southern hemisphere from the point of view of the northern hemisphere? What terms should be ...

 
You're like a man possessed now
 
nah i finished with that ages ago but due to a bad connection i kept hitting resend for aeons after that (-:
 
12:56 PM
Went on an answering + bounty setting + cleanup spree.
 
@AnkurBanerjee: I think I shall now begin to refer to other peoples' weird borean smilies (-:
 
facepalm
 
 
7 hours later…
7:47 PM
did I miss a massive clean up effort by someone? we're down to 12 unanswered questions. last I checked we were in the 20s!
looks like @AnkurBanerjee got busy :)
 
8:16 PM
may as well go do some bounties myself
3 started
 
8:47 PM
I have a question about transferring cash from Canada to a NZ account. Debating if it's really a travel question tho :/
I just transferred cash to NZ to put on my credit card to pay for a flight
but every time I do a transfer, TD Canada charges $30 to do so.
Just feels excesive - used to cost 10 quid in the UK with HSBC.
 
 
2 hours later…
Doc
11:05 PM
suck it up, change banks, or find a cheaper 3rd party to do it
i'm with Citibank in both Australia and the US, and transfers are free
i know ppl who use ozforex.com.au, but not sure if they do NZ banks
looks like they are taking about 1.5 points over spot, which isnt bad if there's no fee
ohh.. $15 fee for <10k, free over that
 
yeah sucking it up is currently my only option
the 3rd party was why I was wondering about it
anyway, just answered travel.stackexchange.com/a/8942/101 - and with that, we have *5000 answers!!!
(dances the 5000-answer jig)
 
Doc
11:25 PM
i take the easy path and just have enough money in both countries that i never need to transfer :) of course, this option may not work for everyone
 
sadly no, my mortgage sucks up a little bit each fortnight ;)
 

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