I know this has nothing to do with politics, but this is the Israel discussion thread and I have a story that I just remembered from a time when I was in Israel.
It was summer 2009, and I was on this study abroad/tour of Israel program hosted by my state's Jewish Federation, and I was there with about a dozen other college kids. We had gone to visit this really major church in northern Israel where the Virgin Mary was supposedly told by Gabriel that she would be pregnant, and I'd drank like a thousand bottles of water 'cause it was hot as hell. I had to piss like a racehorse. I tried to hold it in for a while but it was no use, and I went ahead of the group to look for a bathroom. Damn those ancient temples hiding the restrooms in their infrastructure.
I got up onto what might be described as a veranda, and saw a tour group ahead of me. They were Asian of some sort but I couldn't tell if they were Japanese or Korean because I was too far away to hear them speak. I ran up to them and asked, "Toire wa doko desuka?" By some great miracle, they understood me! Suffice it to say, the story had a happy ending.
My trip to Japan the previous year paid off, and I got to use Japanese in Israel.