Three Important Things

In the few days that I have been in this foreign country I have learned three things of equal importance. First, the bakery up the street was written up in The New York Times for a special kind of baked good they named "Obama cookies." The chocolate-covered chocolate cookie has some sort of chocolatey sweet nut filling. I had to stop in and express my enthusiasm for the kind gesture toward Americans. Regardless of your views toward the 44th president, you should always make it known that you are somehow affiliated with Obama (i.e. he is the Commander in Chief of the country in which you reside) if you see cookies with his name on them. The bakers may give you a free one. And, what do you know... they did! They look better than they taste.

The second important piece of information I learned is that my flatmate has seen scorpions in our apartment. Yep, black scorpions. I cannot comment further.

The third thing I learned, when I admittedly was searching for videos on the Kanye/T. Swift incident, is that YouTube is BANNED. Yes, the site is totally blocked in Turkey! It didn't take long for my flatmate to offer up ways around the ban to calm me down, but I am still in a mild state of shock at the nerve of the Federal government here. The Criminal Court of Peace, to be exact. Just when I was beginning to respect the liberal-mindedness of the State in terms of religious tolerance and secularism despite the vast majority of the population being Muslim, Turkey had to go and ban a site that actually won an award for embodying and promoting Democracy (the George Foster Peabody Award in 2008). And it was just one dumb video from some Greeks insulting Ataturk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, that instigated the whole thing in the first place. Good thing I found a nice proxy server (I am ignoring dragon-themed popup ads that come with it) the to let me through so I can be caught up on my VMA celebrity drama. I don't often look up trashy celeb videos, though. Don't get the wrong idea.