Flickr/.waldec Russia's Foreign Ministry is encouraging its citizens to avoid making sexist jokes in Canada, touching people's heads in Thailand, and calling Jewish people by a derogatory slur in Israel.

In an advisory, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a list of travel recommendations it encourages citizens to follow when visiting other countries. The United States is mysteriously missing from the list.

The recommendations start out reasonably enough ("respect customs and traditions") but then get progressively more mind-bending ("do not use the insulting hand gestures commonly featured in Hollywood films").

Here are 10 of the strangest ways Russians were told to behave when traveling abroad: