21) Bulgarian ATM’s give you 10 lev notes most of the time. You wouldn’t believe how awesome this is! But Romanian ATMS give you 100 lei notes — very annoying! But they are only worth about $37 AUD .

22) Most people seem to live in Communist issue flats. These are usually big, plain, concrete, flats that are built together in one place. Since they fit a lot of people into a relatively small space, a city of 100,000 takes up less area than an Australian city of 40,000. It means that there are a lot more people walking the streets at night.

23) In most toilets you cannot flush your toilet paper. Instead, there is a bin next to the toilet bowl for you to dispose of your freshly dirtied paper. Surprisingly it doesn’t smell bad, as most of the paper is scented. Luckily, I’ve never been the person who had to empty the toilet paper bin. :-)

24) Overtaking is scarey!. Every overtake seems to be made with “only just” enough room. Most minibuses will start the overtaking process before the car coming the other way has gone past, which turns a two lane road into three lanes. And if you are merging lanes, just make sure sure that there is a gap 10cm longer than the length of your car and go for it! Dangerous? YES! I’m so gratefully to live in a country with good drivers.

25) Tailgating is epidemic. I don’t think anybody has ever heard of the 2 second rule. You know… the rule about being no closer than 2s to the car in front. If there was a rule here, it’d be more of a 0.5 metre rule — even on the highway at 100km/hr. Yes, it is scary being a passenger!

26) Coffee… haha… Most coffee is sold as espresso, or medium-blacks. And there you were thinking that I wasn’t going to mention the coffee situation Don’t bother ordering a milk based drink — it’ll either be Nescafe, or have super-terribly frothed milk.

At least it’s cheap. You can buy a rather average take-away shot in a clear plastic cup for 30 stotinki (25c). On the up side, we went out a few times for coffee and cake, and it only cost about 10lev (~$9AUD) for the three of us. So worth it! Although, I think my snobbiness for a good cup of coffee has disappeared. I’m sure it won’t take me long to get it back though :-P

27) “Quality” — Bulgarian goods. I bought an expensive (for Bulgaria; but only $35 in Aussie dollars) ski jacket to keep me warm. But, the first time I wore it, two bits of it broke. Building materials are also dodgy — we stayed at a newly renovated hotel, but all the fittings where already falling apart. I kept wanting to go around the room with a screwdriver and re-tighten every screw.

28) Rubbish is everywhere! There doesn’t appear to be the concept of “you bought it in? you take it out” that we have in Tasmania. Don’t look at the side of any highway — it’ll just look like a tip. Even in Turkey, rubbish was along every walking track we walked along and in every rock cave we looked in. I’ve always heard people comment about hoe clean Tasmania is. I guess I didn’t realise what dirty was until then :-)

29) Bulgarian fashion is funny — well at least stuck in the 90’s. Crimped hair, and pleather (plastic-leather) are currently the rage. And Elly would definitely want me to mention what she calls “nappy pants”. I’ll let you ask her about them :-)

30) Nobody seems to care about pollution. A shopping complex we went to in Romania was built across the road from a fertiliser factory. It didn’t smell very good. Also, everybody has these coal fire places in their houses. If you thought wood smoke pollution was bad in Launceston, you should smell the coal smoke pollution in Eastern Europe!

THE END

Well, I’m now about 25 mins off landing in Australia, so I better head. Bye!

11) There is no concept of a shower screen or curtain. Instead, the entire bathroom floor is treated as the floor of the shower. This means that EVERYTHING in the room gets wet — often including toilet paper! In one hostel we went to, the shower head was almost directly above the toilet seat. On the other hand there was been many times when the only place I could find to store my dry clothes & toiletries was on top on the toilet bowl (lid down of cause :-P).

12) Everybody has a mobile phone. At first, this sounds normal to us. But here, people will buy a phone before they will fix the hole in their roof, or fix their leaking sewage. This photo of a man riding a horse and cart while talking on his mobile phone says it best! I wonder if you could get booked for that?

13) All food is sold by grams In Bulgaria & Romania every menu and sign will state the weight of the meal. This is awesome when ordering a meal at a restaurant, but is really weird when buying an ice-cream cone. The three of us ordered 1-scoop ice-cream cones while in Sofia and the cost of each of our cones differed by about 60c. It was just like buying 4 pieces of ham from the deli — you have no idea how much it will cost you.

I’ve heard of two possible reasons for this. 1. That it’s a requirement of being a part of the EU to keep trade fair. 2. That it is left over from communism, where food was limited to rations so how much something weighed was important.

14) They still use 1 and 2 coins, and they are completely useless and annoying. The ice-cream I mentioned above came to 2.02 lev, so I gave the girl a 2 lev coin. Although, she insisted that I give her the extra 2 stotinki. She then took ages to sort through her coins so that she could give me exact change. What a waste of time! Also, Romania uses 1 lei notes (about $0.37 AUD) which leads to a LOT of notes in your pocket.

15) Food is awesome! Especially salads. Food might contain more fat, but it is far less processed. My bowels are going to be sad to head back to Australia.

16) You usually have to pay to use a public toilet. I wouldn’t mind if the toilets were well maintained, but usually they are much more disgusting than free Australian public toilets! All of the public toilets that I’ve been to in Romania have been smelly squats, and you only get a very small amount of toilet paper. I recommend holding on until Macca’s or your hostel!

Yes, I had to pay to use that!

17) Milk… haha… yeah… If you can find it. If you can it could be out of date — so make sure you check the date Stu. Oh, and it usually comes in a bag, or a uht container, and won’t taste fantastic.

18) Mobile phones are cheap, well the phone itself will cost you about the same, but call rates are much cheaper. In Romania, it was cheaper for me to use my Bulgarian SIM card (with global roaming) to SMS an Australian number than it would cost me to SMS an Australian number from Australia using my Australian SIM card.

19) Speed limits are pretty much ignored. The minibus (called a maxi-taxi here in Romania) didn’t slow down for towns and villages. He (and every other car) just kept driving through the tight village streets at highway speed. I’d hate to know what would happen if a kid jumped out onto the road.

20) Haskovo Zoo (In English: Haskovo Animal Prison). To waste some time we went here for a walk. Apparently some foreigner recently paid the zoo a lot of money to have a large bear (that was living in a cage there) moved to a more humane location. I think somebody should do the same for this poor lion :-(

Yes, I’m still alive! I just haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been up to doing so much. There are many things that I want to blog about, but for the time being I’ll just let you know what I’ve been up to since my last post. So here we go.

Chilling in Хасково (Haskovo)

When I last wrote, I had just have arrived back in Haskovo and was staying at Elly & Stus flat. After chilling out there for a day or two, I left Elly & Stu there and caught the bus back to Istanbul. This time the bus was a lot less exciting — now that I’ve done many border crossings.

Istanbul

Once in Istanbul, I stayed there for a couple of nights in a dorm room full of Australians — actually, most of the backpackers we have met have been Australians. Part of me really liked Istanbul, but there was another part of me that didn’t like it at all. I got really sick of being harassed by Turkish shop workers to come into there store. “Sir, how are you? Do you want to come into my restaurant? We have big menu”.

Since this kind of salesmanship is completely different to what I’m used to in Australia, it didn’t take me long to put up an internal brick-wall, and to start refusing anything and everything that was offered to me. But, then I got hungry, so I had to go into one of them. Then I discovered how nice and helpful everybody is. They may stand outside there shop and pester you to come in and look around, but once you do they are very helpful, understanding, and friendly. It’d be great to get service like that in Australia!

And for something different, here is a bunch of locals fishing off a bridge in Istanbul

Gelipolu (Gallipoli)

Before I left Aus, I wasn’t planning on visiting Gallipoli. However, while staying in Istanbul everybody that I was talking to recommended going there. So I caught a bus down to Eceabat (Eje-a-bat: In Turkish ‘c’ is pronounced as ‘j’), stayed at the Crowded House Hotel for a couple of nights, and did a tour of the place. Buses in Turkey are like no bus in Australia. This bus had free wireless internet, snacks, Çay (Chai, or for us Aussies, tea), and ‘quality’ Turkish satellite TV.

My suggested way to tour Gallipoli: So, if you are ever planning on a trip to Gallipoli, I reckon you should catch the 7.30am bus (35TL) from Istanbul to Eceabat. If you book the Crowded House Tour (45TL / $34AUD) and tell them you are catching the bus, then the tour will wait for you at the bus stop . Afterwards, you can stay there in a dorm room (15TL), and in the morning catch the ferry (2TL) to Çanakkale. Once there, you can catch a bus to any part of Turkey that you like! Most places will tell you to stay the night at Çanakkale, but that is an extra 30mins away. Also, the Crowded House Tour was pretty good quality, and was far cheaper than any other price I was quoted Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Anyway, back to what I did… At first I thought it would be weird to be on a tour that was run by a Turkish guy. In fact, our tour guide’s grandfather fought on the Turkish side. But it turned out to be really good. Apparently both sides had a great respect for each other during the war, so the Gallipoli campaign is often referred to as the last gentleman’s war. Both sides would throw cans of food and notes across no-mans-land to the other side so that they could eat something a bit different. There was also a Turkish solider who came out of the trenches into no-mans-land (holding a white flag), picked up an Aussie who was crying out for help, took him back to the Aussie line, and went back to the Turkish trenches to start shooting again.

Here’s a pic of Anzac Cove. What a terrible beach to land at!

Çanakkale & back to Istanbul

The next day I caught the ferry over to Çanakkale (quite a nice city), had a look around, and then caught the bus back to Istanbul where I met back up with Elly & Stu. We stayed a night there a night and the next day we caught a plane to Cappadocia. Catching this plane wasn’t as simple as it could have been, but you’ll have to wait until my next blog post to read about that :-)

Here’s the actual Trojan horse from the movie Troy which is now located on the docks of Çanakkale, and below that is the river at Çanakkale.

Week 1

About two weeks ago I landed in Istanbul after a loooong flight (Parts 1, & 2), had a look around, and stayed a night there. The next day I caught the bus to Haskovo, Bulgaria and stayed there for a few days with Elly & Stu. They are currently living there in an old communist style flat and teaching English to a 6yo. There we saw everything Haskovo has to offer, met some of the other Aussies there, and went a few times into the Mahalle. The Mahalle is a really interesting place (we would probably call it a slum), and I hope to write more about it in another post. A photo of the awesome Haskovo tour to the abandoned & incomplete power plant is shown below. Apparently, it never got completed due to the fall of Communism.

Checking out Bulgaria

Elly & Stu have also written some posts about these few days —
part 1,
part 2

Once we (read ‘me’) got bored of Haskovo, Elly, Stu, & I started out on our tour of Bulgaria by catching a bus to Plovdiv. Plovdiv would be my favourite Bulgarian city so far because it’s a great mix of new and old. We stayed a night there in a 8 bed dorm room, were we got woken up by some drunk travellers who came back drunk at 5am and then got up to some [not so] hush hush shenanigans. Memories = Repressed :-).

The next day we caught the very cool train to Bansko. Bansko is an up and coming ski-resort, and has recently become the most developed ski-resort in the Balkans. Luckily for us, it was the off season, so the place wasn’t crawling with tourists. It also meant that we stayed in rather nice hotel, for only $13/night which is much cheaper than what we could have stayed in a hostel. for. While there we climbed most of the way up Mt. Vihren, which you can read about on Elly’s blog post, The Grand Tour Part 2. Here’s one of the MANY photos that I took while up there:

After Bansko, we bused to Sofia and checked that our for about 4-5 hours. I couldn’t stand it there. It stunk of pollution, looked dirty, and there was way too many beggars who were trying to scam off us. When we got to the train station, somebody came up to me asking if they could help me. My first thought was that it was a scam, but then he seems to be wanted to help me find where we were going, and not asking for money. Maybe he works here I thought? Anyway, turns out he wanted money for helping us out. So I reluctantly offered him 2 lev (only about $1.60, but worth about $5 for them), but he wouldn’t take it and insisted I give him 5 lev. Once I did that, he tried to get 5 more lev off Stu, but I told him sternly that 5 lev was more than enough for showing us where the ticket office was and off he pottered.

Heading to Romania

Elly & Stu have also written some posts about these few days —
part 3,

That night we caught the night train to București, Romania. It was a 9 hour journey, but didn’t seem to take that long since we had a sleeper car. The border crossing was pretty uneventful – we didn’t even need to get out of our beds. The Romanian guard did make us laugh we he said, “Australia? – Kangaroo”. The train then crossed the Danube and we were in Romania.

We arrived at București at 5:45am and since it was dark, we didn’t know what to do besides buying some barely drinkable coffee at macca’s so we could use their wifi while waiting for it to become light outside. That was good, because weren’t planning on coming to Romania as quick as we did, so we had no idea what to do. The most interesting part of McD’s was not the coffee (that was sickening) but have the staff physically remove a beggar who was trying to get me to buy him something. It’s really sad that beggars are really common here. I had a kid harrasing me outside an ATM I was trying to use yesterday. I’m still undecided about how I want to react to them because it’s impossible to give to everybody. When I get a better idea, I think think I should do a blog post about it. Any ideas?

Anyway, back to the story… We left macca’s, passed though the gauntlet of taxi drivers, walked for 3-4 hours with our packs, and arrived at the maxi-taxi station. Oh yeah, we had a bit of “fun” trying to find the place without a map. Elly commented that “you know it’s bad when Humphrey starts whinging!”.

Now these maxi-taxi’s require an explanation. They are Mercedes Benz vans, with seats, and a couple of bars screwed into the walls for people to hang on to. They are a long way from comfortable and leg-room is non-existent. Of course, that is only if you get a seat. According to the sign on the inside of one of these mini-buses it was able to carry 16 seated and 16 standing. That’s 32 people in a tiny van thing! Yesterday, while standing up in a maxi-taxi, one of the screws fastening the bar was I hanging onto came loose, “CL-ICK”. Was a little freaky Oh, and the drivers cain the maxi-taxis! They tailgate VERY close, overtake with less than a metre to spare, honk, and don’t really slow down for village streets. These drivers would loose their licences very quickly in Australia. But, these are the easiest and quickest way to travel around Romania. Thanks to jeffltaylor2 for uploading this photo of one to Flickr.

In Romania

The maxi-taxi to Târgu Mureş took a bit over 5 hours. You can tell he was speeding because it took us 6 hours on the way back. Once there we stayed with the Nairns for a number of days. On Sunday, James took us to a local church, followed by a “just as spiritual” game of paint-ball. In the last round I broke the main rule: Don’t shoot anybody closer than 5m. Sorry for the friendly-fire Stu!

While there we also did a heap of shopping, chilling out, and going out for the odd drink. Yesterday we checked out the village of Sighişoara, which is a place where Vlad (The actual Dracula) once lived. It was a really nice historical village, and we also managed to find the best coffee that I’ve had in either Bulgaria or Romania.

Back to Bulgaria

Today we caught the maxi-taxi back to București, where we are currently. Tomorrow we’re planning on catching the train back to Elly & Stu’s place, where I’ll spend a couple of nights before heading onto Turkey. We’re still not too sure how the Turkish leg will work out. I don’t think Elly & Stu are able to spend a whole two weeks in Turkey, so they will either join me for the first week, or stay in Bulgaria and rendezvous with me somewhere in Turkey. Everything else has just fallen into place so far, so I trust that will too.

Here’s Elly being tough at the train station:

Thanks for reading my blog. If you were gullible enough to fall for my recent facebook status update, then I extend a “ha ha” in your general direction. And, remember about the commenting rule – commenting is cool, just like school.

PS - You may have noticed that I’ve added a new link to the top of my blog for a google map of my trip. I’m planning on adding the Romanian leg of the journey to the map soon.

PPS - I’m currently proof-reading this post while sitting on the aforementioned train, and have about 2.5 hours left. We’re in the only room that doesn’t have a working light so it’s heaps dark in here and therefore hard to type. Hopefully we can work out when we are at the right station.

NEWS FLASH - We just noticed that it’s snowing outside the train carriage! Hooray for travelling in a train through snow.

Well, I’ve already watched 2 episodes of Dexter on this train trip and I have exactly enough battery power for 1 more episode. So chao chao. Oh, by the time I publish this we’ll be back at Elly & Stu’s commy flat.

La revedere!

1) EVERYBODY smokes EVERYWHERE. Cafes, pubs, restaurants, the street, toilets, and everywhere STINKS like cigarette smoke. My clothes consistently smell of the stuff. I wonder what their lung cancer rates are? I definitely won’t miss being able to go out for a coffee and not have to breathe in 10 peoples cigarette smoke. Oh, and it seems totally ok to smoke in front of children!

2) Beer is CHEAP, generally of a better quality, and can be bought anywhere — The supermarket, KFC, the fridge at the backpackers hostel, corner shops, and just about anywhere. It’s often cheaper than water, and always cheaper than Cuke! Of cause, there is (apparently) a much bigger problem with alcoholism here. I wonder why?

It’s great to go out to some trendy place and be able to grab a pint (~500ml) of some tasty European beer for less than $1AUD. Wine is cheap too. A couple of nights ago we were drinking a fantastic pinot noir that cost about 12 lei ($4.71AUD) for a 1.5 litre bottle. Although it’s not as cheap for the people here (who have a much lower average wage than us Australians). Here’s a picture of a German beer sitting on a supermarket shelf.

3) Power points don’t have on/off switches. Every time I plug in my computer I get a big blue arc!

4) Music in Bulgaria is terrible! 50% of the music Bulgarian cafes, pubs, buses, etc play is the English music from the 90’s. On the plus side Romanian have a good taste in music — I’ve heard Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, and The Living End (Yes, Australian music in Romania!).

Actually, this leads into a funny story: Today, we walked in a shop and we all heard Eskimo Joe playing. After we all commented on how cool it was to hear Australian music in a shop, we realised that I had accidentally hit the play button on my phone!

5) Wires go everywhere. Nobody seems to hide wiring inside cabinets or walls. The installation of internet at Elly & Stu’s flat involves an Ethernet cable hanging down the side of the apartment complex from the roof, and coming into the flat via a freshly drilled hole. Here’s a picture of a bunch of wires that are right next to the front door of Elly & Stu’s communist flat.

6) Electric buses — YES you heard me right. They look like normal buses, but have big arms that reach out to the overhead wires. I’m still yet to catch one though. I wonder what happens if they decide to not follow the wires and take a different street.

7) ATM’s don’t appear to charge fees. I could be wrong, but none are appearing on my statement except for the ones that my bank charge :-)

Internet is cheap as chips. Yes, I’m serious! You could get a months worth of internet here for less than a bag of seaport chips. I was talking to a Bulgarian about how ridiculously expensive Australian internet is. It was quite an effort to explain the concept of a download quota. They all just have unlimited downloads here.

9) Pedestrian lights & zebra crossings don’t mean a thing. They more are just a suggested place and time for you to considering crossing the road. Most cars ignore zebra crossing completely, and it’s not uncommon for a car to run a red light and almost knock over a few good looking Aussies.

10) There are just 3 kinds of cheese — yellow, white, or blue.

So that ends part one of the quirks of Eastern Europe. I have a list of about 20 more, that I hope to finish putting to together over the next couple of days. So keep posted. And remember to comment or I’ll shoot you in the head with a quality Romanian paint-ball gun :-P

Firstly, I was the only English speaker on the whole bus. So that was the first time in my life I wouldn’t have been able to talk to anybody around! The driver could say a few words in English, as could the hostess. Yes, you heard me right — the bus had a hostess. Who regularly bought us refreshments of water, tea, coffee, crappy packaged cake, etc. Also, this 5.5 hour bus trip only cost me 35 lira ($26.15 AUD) — BARGAIN! Oh, and that was with a good quality company — there are some dodgy looking ones out there! I couldn’t even get from Launceston to Hobart on crappy Redline for that.

So why was the bus trip so awesome? Well the bus companies slogan describes it pretty well — “Crazy Holidays”! The scenery was really intriguing because this was the first opportunity that I had to see what regular Turkey & Bulgaria looked like. There wasn’t anything super super amazing about the Turkish scenery, but everything was slightly different enough to keep me wanting to look out the window. Here’s a picture of one of the many pictorial road signs. Many cool points to the first person who can explain what the sign means. Also, notice the nuclear cooling tower in the background.
You should also be able to infer what side of the road you drive on here.

Nuclear Reactor #1

Two or three hours after leaving Istanbul, we drove past an actual nuclear power plant. This is probably a non-event for the locals, but a first for me. Back in Australia I was recently wiki-reading about the Chernobyl & Three Mile Island incidents. If you don’t know much about them, I really suggesting looking them up! I was almost speechless after reading in detail about Chernobyl — how it melted down, and what they did to “fix it” is so crazy! I’m guessing this one is ok though?

The Border Crossing

I’ve often seen border crossings on TV, but I’ve never experienced one myself until this bus trip. Since I was on a respectable bus company, the crossing was almost uneventful. Although, my passport took the longest to process. Everybody on the bus in front of us, had to stand with their own bags outside of the bus. But not us. The Bulgarians opened the cargo doors, had a really quick look from the outside, closed them, and we were on our way.

Humphrey, the tobacco smuggler

The most bizarre aspect of the crossing would have to be, what I’m calling, “no-mans-land”. That’s the area between the Turkish & Bulgarian borders. All it is a big car park & a big duty free shop that sells cigarettes & spirits. I think the only reason we stopped there for 15 minutes was so that everybody could buy duty free cigarettes. Everybody smokes over here, but I’ll probably write more about that in another post.

I think there is a limit to how much goods (ie. cigarettes, spirits, coffee, etc) each person can bring into the country. I’m pretty sure that I was already well over the limit for how much coffee you can import, but whatev! Since I didn’t smoke, I had three different people ask me to take tax-free cigarettes into Bulgaria for them. I had no idea what the first lady who asked was saying, so I walked away from her.

Then the bus driver asked me. By now I had worked out what these people wanted me to do. The driver handed me 66 euros ($108AUD) and a big armful of cigarettes. There would have been about 25 packets of cigarettes in my arms — so they were pretty cheap! Later the hostess also asked me to do the same, but I managed to explain (by doing the arm actions of driving) that I already had done that for the driver. So, I’m pretty sure that we didn’t “technically” do anything wrong, but those cigarettes so weren’t for my use :-P

My passport took the longest to process, but it still only took a minute. I was the only one who passport got stamped, and got asked questions: “Where are you going”, and “How long for”? Except for what it says in Loney Planet, I have no idea what my entry conditions are. All I know is that there is a stamp in my passport with Cyrillic characters on it. But whatev, I’m here now :-)

Bulgaria

As soon as we crossed over the border, EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, looked different. The quality of the road was worse, there were falling down buildings everywhere, there were people in farms farming, all of the signs were in Cyrillic characters, and everything just looked older and less maintained. I instantly decided that Bulgaria was a much cooler (in a weird communist Chudleigh way) than Turkey :-P.

So that was the bus trip. It was awesome to see Elly & Stu standing at the bus stop waiting for me. Hooray! I could finally speak English again! Heaps more has happened since then, so I hope to write more soon :-)

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! 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  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 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 ;-)

Since I’ve got 3.5 hours left to go, and I haven’t managed to fall asleep yet, I thought it’d be the perfect time to some blogging. I’ll make this post live whenev’ I come across some wifi-ness, so I’ll probably be on the other side of the world by the time you read this.

Jetstar-ness

Even though I’ve been sitting on planes, I’ve really enjoyed today. I stayed up to 2am last night packing, only to have to wake up at 7:30 to go catch my Jetstar flight. Yes, I’m tired! The best thing about today has been the people I’ve met. On the Jetstar flight to Melb i got talking to this steel miner who was telling me all these awesome things to do in thailand. I think I want to go there some time now.

On a completely different tangent, last weekend in Launy I got followed / stalked / harrassed by some weird guy in a park in Launceston. Anyway I swore he was sitting a few seats behind me on the jetstar flight. Chances are it wasn’t him, since I can barely remember what he looked like. However, his hair looked familiar, and he did give me a weird look. Or at least, my subconsious told me he did. Anyway, I left much better once I managed to loose him in the airport.

Coffee-crawl-ness

Since my Jetstar flight was ontime/early (yes you heard me right), I skybused into the CBD of Melb to drink some coffee at St Ali. I was cutting it fine (needed to get there, drink coffee and get back in 2.5hr) but it was so worth it. Even if the coffee wasn’t as good as last time I was there. But still, much better than airport coffee.

What are you doing here God?

While at St Ali, I got talking to this business guy who was doing some proof reading there. We had some good chats about life, work, travelling to europe, etc… Anyway, it turned out that he was about to leave for a meeting right next to the airport, so he offered me a ride. My first thought was, “Oh wow, what a coincidence! God must be doing something here”. That thought was immediately followed by, “Oh, he could be a serial killer who sits around looking for unsuspecting victims”. Anyway, that got me thinking a bit later on about trusting and following Gods lead. So here is goes.

Side note, this aeroplane red wine is pretty good!

If I was back in Tassie, I probably would have just taken the ride with the guy. But before I left Tassie, a number of people told me to be safe, don’t take risks, etc. So, all of a sudden, I found myself praying, “So God, what’s going on? Is this you bringing cool opportunities my way? Maybe even you told him to offer me a ride?” After all, I was only asking him for opportunities last night. “Or God, is something going to go wrong, if I go with this guy? Will I miss my flight? Or maybe something worse?”

So I’m interested to hear what you guys would do in this situation? How do you know if God is leading you? It’d be great to get some discussion happening in the comments below. :-)

After a very quick prayer, I was pretty sure he wasn’t a serial killer, but I also didn’t hear God say that this was a sitition he was setting up. I’m not saying that it wasn’t Gods plan, but I didn’t hear him say it was So I decided to just get the SkyBus back to the airport. I figured everybody back home would kill me themselves if i didn’t do that Ok, so I was (and still am) about 98.273% sure that he was just a nice guy who was being helpful. But, I thought better safe than sorry.

But at least it got me thinking about listening to God and trusting him. After all, there are all these verses about how we should step out in faith and trust God. So in theory, I could have trusted that God would look after me. On the otherhand, God gives us wisdom and wants us to make smart decisions. So I’m sure I made the right decision anyway.

Don’t worry, if it sounds like a big thing, it wasn’t. It was more the thoughts about following God’s leading that were interesting.

The first leg of the long flight!

Well this is the best plane I’ve ever travelled in by a long shot. Malayasian airlines is better than jetstar! Every seat comes with a pillow, blanket, and surprisingly comfortable seats. The flight is also rather empty. In my row (of 9 seats, there are only four people). I’m in the middle bit all my myself, so I’ve already pushed up all of the arm rests and tried tried to sleep lying across four seats . Although, I still didn’t fall asleep. But I’m planning on trying again soon once I finish writing this!

Aeroplane Food

The food on the plane has also been good. So much better than the crap I tried to eat while waiting at the airport. I only ate half of the airport muffin I bought. And whatever this red-wine is they are serving, it’s pretty good! Nice and smooth. Hopefully it helps me sleep. Sitting/lying here on this flight has been the most relaxing this that I’ve done in the last week of so. Would it be weird if I said it was theoputic? Oh, and the best this is that they gave us one of those weis bars for dessert! That hit the spot VERY nicely.

Aeroplane People

The people near me are also really cool. In front are a couple of Indian friends who are going to a wedding. They didn’t know each other was going to the wedding until they bumped into each other at the airport. Behind me are a couple of pom-ish girls who have been touring in Aus for the past month. They seems to be very skilled at falling asleep — maybe I should wake them up and ask them how they do it!

And somewhere on the otherside of the plane is an old couple. They remind me a bit of my Auty Denny & Auncle Peter. When I went for a walk about the plane to look out the window, they were pointing out places we could see in the Australian outback where they havebeen 4×4ing.

Almost done now :-)

So all in all, I’ve really enjoyed today. I’ve still got about 2.5 hours left of this plane… Then I have to wait around until midnight (3am AEST) for my next flight to somewhere which will take at least 7 hours. I’m not sure where there next flight is going. Flight Center told me that I have to go via Dubai, but my boarding passes don’t mention anything about a stop over. So I guess I see where we land!

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, I commend you! It’s a really long post! Thanks for reading, and it’d make my day if you left some comments. Now to either watch an episode of Dexter or Heroes on my netbook, or try and fall asleep. I think I’ll go the sleep option, because I only have 2.5 hrs left on this plane, and who knows, I may not get to lay down on the next flight.