Well I’m not sure whether this is really day 2, day 1, or day 3 — I’m confused. I’ve only had 2 hours sleep since I’ve left Tasmania, so my head is pretty spaced out and tired. Anyway, I’m writing this post as an excuse to stay awake for another hour or two. It’d just be weird to go to be at 7.30pm :-P

So if this post doesn’t read very well blame my lack of sleep! It’s weird, I don’t feel like the time-zones are wrong — I just feel tired and dizzy. It remind’s me of that clip from Flight of the Conchords after they have taken acid and the walls of the bathroom are moving back and forth. Oh well, I’m planning on a long and deep sleep tonight!

First up, check out what this bank is called:

I spoke too soon before

Can long-haul flights ever be good?

In my last post, I mentioned how I was quite enjoying the flight. Well… I definitely spoke to soon! The 3rd leg of my journey (Kuala Lumper to Dubai) was painful. The 7+ hr flight departed KL at 2:59am AEST, so my body just wanted to go to sleep. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t sleep while sitting upright in a seat. Luckily we got there eventually :-)

Of cause, it wasn’t all bad. I met some more cool people, such as a big group of older Aussies who were on-route to do a tour in Turkey. Also, the Malaysian girl sitting across from me had actually presented a paper at some conference hosted at the Uni of Tas! Small world hey!

“… because of Technical.”

Fault-starts are common in running, but what about aeroplanes? Well at about 4:30am our plane started powering down the Dubai runaway. We had not gone very far before the pilot cut the trust and we just rolled to the other end of the runway. I’ve got no idea what went wrong, except for the description given to us by the pilot, “blah blah blah… … we are returning to the terminal because of technical.” Great description mate! :-P Anyway, two hours later the technicians had fixed our plane and we were back in the air.

Istanbul

So I’m now in Istanbul! Security at the airport was almost non-existent. They asked no questions, said nothing, and looked at none of my bags. They just gave me my USD20 visa sticker, stamped my passport, and I was in Turkey! I imagine it’s going to be a lot more complicated to get back into Australia.

Istanbul is a pretty awesome city. Here’s the official list of Humphreys Top Weird/Cool/& crazy things about Istanbul:

• Everything is so old! I’m used to being in Australia where no building is more than ~200 years old.
• I’m the odd one out in terms of ethic background / religion! There are barely any ranga’s here (except for tourists).
• Sales people are annoying! Almost every shop (at least in the region I’m staying in) has a sales evangelist standing outside their shop. They seem to use one of three main approaches to try and convince you to come into their business.
  1. Just ask you if you are interested: “Sir, come in for a beer, a meal, etc”, or the most recent one I heard, “Come in and have a look. Looking is free.”
  2. Just start a friendly conversation with you: “Are you having a nice day”, “how long have you been here?”, “Are you from Barcelona?” — I was wearing a Barcelona t-shirt today :-)
  3. Get angry at you — “Sir, can you please wait a moment. SIR, I need to talk to you. SIR! SIR! It’s important. Without a jacket you will get sick!”
• There are no road rules — Red lights don’t seem to mean much, and cars do not try to avoid people. I’ve had to move very quicky a few times today to avoid becoming roadkill. Also, every 2nd taxi has a dent & scratched paintwork :-P mmm…
• I no-longer think it’s weird to suddenly see a number of polis standing around on the street with machine guns. I walked past about 50 polis officers today — 10 or so with machine guns. Later on, I walked past some building that was being guarded by two polis with machine guns.

“We go to baths, then my hotel?”

While walking past the ensemble of polis officers, this dude started talking to me. It was a bit weird, but since there was heaps of people around (inc 50 polis) I wasn’t too worried. Once he found out it was my first time to Istanbul he wanted to take me around and show me some stuff. “We go to Turkish baths, massage, we have some tea, then go back to my hotel?”

I would be keen to try a lot of those things (except for his hotel), but not with some random person who just started talking to me on the street. Luckily, he didn’t seem offended that I rejected his offer.

“You have girlfriend back home in Australia?”

“Are you from Barcelona?” were the words that I heard as I was stopped by some Turkish guy in his low 20’s. That was the 3rd time today that I had been stopped with that question. Serves me right for wearing the t-shirt :-P Anyway, this guy just started up a friendly conversion about where I’m from, what I’m doing here, and then [all of a sudden] about whether I have a girlfriend back in Tassie.

“Do you like Bulgarian girls?”, since he then knew by then that I was going to Bulgaria soon. “What about Turkish girls? hey hey? Not good for liking but good for satisfying needs!” Wow! the topic of conversation changed that way very quickly! What a PIMP! I didn’t hang around after that. He even had to stop and think about what his name was when i asked!

Bed time!

Well it’s been an awesome day! I’ve eaten kebabs, Turkish delight, balaclava, and Turkish coffee, and got to look around at heaps of cool stuff. So, it’s bed time for me!

Thanks for reading, and remember that school is cool — but not as cool as commenting on somebodies (read “my”) blog post ;-)