[Noisebridge-discuss] Best strategy and currency for foreign travel..

[Sai Emrys]

Re. Israel vs Islamic countries - supposedly you used to be able to
get a Israel to give you a separate piece of paper stamped with your
visa (NOT a separate passport), so you could ditch it and avoid the
assrape when subsequently visiting their enemies, because they wanted
more tourists. According to Wikipedia though (which in turn is
according to UK government travellers' advisory[1]), they don't do
this any more. Anyone have recent experience?

Re. confirmation of location - don't be *too* hard on the banks for
that. After all, you'd be hard on them also if suddenly someone used
your card in what to you was an obviously irregular manner from a
foreign country. They're trying to do a behavioral metric for fraud,
which is a nontrivial problem. (After all, maybe you *did* just fly to
Nigeria and decide you needed a lot of cash advances…) Perhaps you can
come up with a better metric?

Re. carrying 2 different passports - unless you hold multiple
citizenships (which you probably don't, but in which case you get one
per), this is illegal[2] and may subject you to major assrape at
borders if you're caught. Your passport belongs to your government,
not you, and they get very very pissy if they think you're forging /
stockpiling / selling them, or if they discover one for a citizenship
they didn't approve of. You'll have to prove you're not a spy /
terrorist / illegal with forged documents / etc, and then deal with
the law-breaking bit too. This is probably much worse than the hassle
of getting interrogated about your judaic vs islamic political
leanings.

- Sai

[1] http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/middle-east-north-africa/israel-occupied
- "In the past the Israeli immigration authorities have agreed to
stamp landing cards, where available, and not passports, but since
September 2006 they will rarely agree not to stamp your passport."
[2] with some rare exceptions you probably don't qualify for - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#One_passport_per_person - note
that though it says some countries issue two passports for exactly
this visa-blacklist thing, I looked and found no evidence that the US
does so; they require you to hand in your old one unless you're
reporting it lost/stolen