My friend Dan is in Turkey, coordinating the Global Partners study abroad program there. He is keeping his stateside friends up to date with a blog and Flickr account–guess who suggested that? :)

I thought y’all would enjoy this from Dan’s latest post, where he runs down a list of things he has been able to do for himself since settling in to Ankara:

11. Procured a library card (and oh, was THAT an ordeal—seven different forms stamped by seven different offices, and I can still only check out books–“DVDs yok”– no DVDs. I recall it is this region that gives us the English word “Byzantine”).

So whenever someone accuses your library of not being customer-centered enough, you can say “hey, you should try to get a library card in Ankara sometime! This is Nordstrom’s compared to that!”