this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
110 points (98.2% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
3 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe ๐ช๐บ
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, ๐ฉ๐ช ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was wondering why they would call the BBC, of all places, to help get out of a truck in France, but then I realized that they probably didn't speak French (they were, after all, being shipped to the UK). The BBC is probably the most-visible face of the UK to the rest of the world; if you wanted to call someone in Europe who speaks English, it's probably one of the most-obvious places.
I know it's a common joke that French people don't speak English, but I'm sure their police surely would understand & speak English?
I dunno, but I just Googled for both the National Police and the Paris police department to look for contact information. In both cases, Google sent me to the English language Wikipedia page (which linked to it), andt the websites themselves were only French.
considers
I guess maybe one could call the French embassy in Vietnam. They could presumably do Vietnamese or something.
EDIT: Ironically, I did almost the same thing the other day. I noticed, from an article, that a number of shops in Ukraine last winter that had lost power due to Russian missiles were running space heaters on diesel generators. That wastes a lot of diesel -- there are inexpensive Chinese diesel heaters that could be used instead. I went trying to find some sort of contact person in the Ukrainian government involved with energy who might be a reasonable person to drop a note to, but there's only so much in English. I eventually wound up trying to contact a charity in the UK that had been working to heat Ukrainian homes that had been impacted by explosions instead, hoping that they could direct me to a relevant party. And I wasn't in the position of having a frantic, suffocating family member calling me on the other end -- I was more willing to spend time searching.