Surfing the net

While accessing the internet worked well (several places offered wifi), using it was more challenging. The Syrian government controls the internet tightly. Most websites that I access on a regular basis were blocked which made using the internet a bit of a treasure hunt. In contrast to the internet filtering that happens in places like China for instance, the filter seems to be based on whitelisted URLs, since a lot of the innocent websites that I tested as well as the majority of the links in Google's search result were blocked. But Google itself was accessible!