Well that sounds silly.

For the lack of a better word

lying to immigration officers is almost always silly. Someone else lying about the premise of your trip is incredibly silly

Somebody, somebody we probably don't know, was the last tourist on earth to walk the great wall of china in the gansu provence

now it's covered in cement

@ZachLipton IO's will lean on sponsors sometimes

Especially students. ESPECIALLY students get stuffed

They call the school and lean on them to disown the student

Then the student is bounced

So never EVER EVER plan to arrive in the UK late friday or the weekend if you are a student. NEVER

they covered 700 miles of the Great Wall in cement a couple years ago and people just noticed? wow

yo

the list of countries is getting semi random expansion and recategorization spaghetti just as i expected

why list chechnya separately as a subentry under russia but not Tuva or Ingushetia or Dagestan or ...

yeah that's pretty much an intractable problem

especially if we don't insist on a strict list like UN members (which means leaving out, say, Taiwan) or ISO country codes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states ?

@ZachLipton Somebody was the last tourist

@ZachLipton: I disagree. we can use the "lonely planet system". if it requires a visa or functional equilvalent. that's more travel oriented and less political oriented. and fixes the taiwan problem.

another way is to not bother listing such pieces until at least one of us has been there

@ZachLipton No, when the friend heard "Border force", they panicked, and thought that they would be coming for her (as she was an SA citizen, not aUK one)

that's the story

so the friend with the place to stay just said "i'm not doing anything, honest guv" basically

@hippietrail This one isn't particularly mysterious, everybody and their dog has heard of Chechnya, a few might have heard about Ingushetia or Dagestan and what's Tuva?

@Relaxed so it's a list of heard-of-ness now??

What's Tuva? WHAT'S TUVA??!!

you're obviously not a fan of richard feynman or polyphonic throatsinging or eclectic documentaries!

No, but I'm a fan of Gary Johnson...

Richard Feynman - The Last Journey Of A Genius

Wasn't defending anything mind you, but I am not surprised!

And I can Google just as well as the next guy, but the question was too tempting...

sorry can't get an autothumbnail of the feynman one but both are awesome and will make you cancel your next trip and go to Tuva instead

Have you been there?

So a user was commenting on my answer, saying my sources were unreliable/inconclusive. It made me unsure. Would anyone care to review my sources, to see if they are sufficient and/or reliable or not? travel.stackexchange.com/a/79271/41775

@Fiksdal, sorry, not me.

@Willeke NP :)

If you know a few people who might be able, you can ping them. (I just get confused by legal language.)

Hmm... Any candidates? Perhaps Indian residents or legal people.. I know @GayotFow is pretty smart with legal stuff

@JoErNanO or @hippietrail perhaps.

That would be a bit of a start.

:)

@CMaster Perhaps the dupe search box was designed by Puzzling SE moderators.

like, I can never find certain questions with it

like the "Do I need a visa to transit in the Schengen Area" doesn't seem to ever come up

yet if I just put "Schengen transit" in to the normal search box, it's there, straight off.

Sounds like Puzzling SE.

@CMaster What I do is, I add a custom search engine to Chrome, which is Google with the argument site:travel.stackexchange.com. Then I attach it to "T" on the keyboard. So to search within TSE I can just to Ctrl + T, T and then Tab, then type the search term then Enter

@GayotFow No need to argue with the OP. ;)

@JoErNanO did you mean @Fiksdal?

@Willeke I think he was answering Gayot from like >8 hours ago

about an argument with the OP in Q about how to calculate days in Schengen.

May also be, some people do react slow :P

But the advise does suit the situation @Fiksdal is in as well.

@Willeke Haha. Actually, I think it's good that people are peer reviewing answers and checking sources and facts. It raises the quality of answers here. So I'm glad the user challenged the sources used. I'd just like others to have a look at it too. travel.stackexchange.com/a/79271/41775

I keep coming across edits by Ali Awan where I have doubts or do not agree with his changes. Now I am looking at one on medication where he changed one time the latin name of a medication but not the other time the same word was used.

Other times he makes changes to grammar that do not improve and leaves formatting, while claiming to have improved formatting.

Just reject when they are bad edits

I think I may have also done so

There was one recentley which simply made the english worse, may have been from Ali Awan

whoever it was had about 1500 rep

I find them after they get approved. I have rolled one back so far, repaired a few more.

@Willeke In my experience, 95% of his edits are helpful, but not all of them. So they need to be checked, we can't just accept them since it's him. @CMaster

Ali Awan is up to 1660 or so now.

I tried pinging him (twice now) on the A he edited but the ping did not catch.

I feel he should be told to be more careful in editing and leave off unless it is a main improvement.

If anyone has some spare rep they want to throw around, have a look at the oldest questions on the site and see if you want to throw a bounty onto them :) Let's get some of these legacy questions some love and attention.

No spare rep, I am 380 below the next new privilege.

And this 1000 is slllloooooowwww going.

@Willeke I stopped browsing the chat on my phone since the app I used stopped working. The new mobile chat killed it.

:)

I am usually not in during working hours, I am at home 'ill' (not good enough to work but nothing to worry about) most of the time I do not react for up to 16 hours at a time.

Maybe I should ping a TSE mod and ask him to send a warning to Ali Awan as he is making a lot of low quality edits, often with unwanted bits in it.

Even where I do not see reasons to roll back, I think most of his text edits are very week, very 'follow the book' and often harm as much as they heal, all in small bits.

yeah, and a bunch seem to be on random old questions there's no real need to edit

we don't need a systemic effort to clean up the text of old questions

I wonder if he does it to get the 2 points for each? If so, we do not need the extra work either.

Although I have to admit that the review queues are short and well maintained these days.

"f the computer and TV are simply for your personal use during your trip and you will be taking them back to Turkey, then you don't need to declare them" :)

doesn't everyone take their TV with them on holiday?

Do they have TVs in America?

yeah that's why I posted that comment first

I do have plenty of insufferable friends who like to brag about not owning a television

but everyone else has more than enough TVs to make up the difference

Maybe this guy is visiting one of them?

but yeah, a customs officer might blink at someone visibly carrying a TV

it's a small TV too, 37cm

I wonder if it really is a TV

probably a computer monitor

perhaps

I was sure we had a dupe on "how does US customs work?" but I couldn't find one

@A.A. I'm coming to Madrid next weekend. Wanna meetup?

I'm passing through Madrid on the 1st

I do sort of feel bad for this guy travel.stackexchange.com/questions/79358/…, he royally screwed up his UK marriage situation thinking he was doing the right thing