Wednesday, May 30, 2001

London, England to Istanbul, Turkey

Maybe….just maybe…every holiday out of England needs to frustrate me at the beginning so I can enjoy it all the more.  After a frustrating night’s sleep we were on the 6.10am bus to Heathrow from Kingston.  It seems as though the bus teases you as it goes around the edge of the entire airport (seemingly 10 times) before you arrive.  Check in – simple enough concept – not for the Poms.  After finally getting to the front of the queue, our attendant disappears for half an hour with no explanation.  But we’re on holidays.  Once again without explanation our flight leaves 2 hours later than scheduled. 

We fly into Vienna, missing our connection – hoping for a night in a hotel – to find we have been rebooked on a Turkish Airlines flight in 2 hours.  Of the 15 rows of seats on the flight, we manage to get the one where someone had thrown up the flight before.  Nice smell!  At 8.30pm, with my ears screaming in pain from the descent, we arrive in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. 

We get through passport control without a hitch and our bags are waiting.  It is now dark and we are unsure of what to do, so we decide to get an agency to book us into a hotel.  He suggested 3 (we took the cheapest).  We took Hotel Eris as it looked OK in the brochure.  The drive into town was scarier than any roller coaster I had been on, and at several points I thought we weren’t going to make it.  The drive through the city was great.  I was pleased with where we were going.  Then the driver took a turn off the main road and within 2 minutes we were at the hotel.  It looked like a seedy part of town, but we were only going to be here for the night.  We got our US$65 room (can someone say “rip off”) and just crashed – equally parts tired and scared to leave the hotel.

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