Proper Layover - Saturday, June 7, 2014

I guess we can call today my first day in Turkey. My flight from Boston landed at 4:25pm and my flight to Johannesburg took off at 12:55am. I consider that 8 hours and 30 mins in a new place! Give or take a few hours for getting a visa, dealing with immigration (twice) and figuring out how to get from the airport to the city (and vice versa).

Turkish Airlines actually has this really cool program where if your layover in Istanbul is longer than 6 hours, they’ll take you on a tour of the city…FOR FREE. Unfortunately, they’re super sneaky about this and basically “offer” it, but ensure that nobody can take it. The tour leaves once a day, at 9am. My flight got in at 4:25pm…so that didn’t do much good for me. Except give me the idea that if I had 8 hours, I could see the city! No matter that it was a Saturday evening.

I went to the Turkish Airlines “Hotel Desk” where I had read this tour leaves from (one of the few things I had Googled in advance) and asked the representative for suggestions of what I should do for 8 hours. He gave me directions to a great restaurant…in the airport. After a little bit of miming and reverting back to my “Africa English” in which I don’t use articles or conjugate verbs, we got to…

“Ah…you want to go to the Grand Bazaar? The Blue Mosque?”

These sounded like places. At this point, I had no idea where the airport was relative to the city (North? South? Close? Far?) and how one got to the city from the airport. He started explaining how to take the metro to get to these touristy sites. I thought I understood, but there were transfers involved and Turkish words really don’t translate too well into my ears, so I pulled out my trusty travel journal and I got:

Airport à Zeytinburnu à Beyazid Sultanajamet [Yeah…I wasn’t going to remember those words…]

I’ve lived in NYC long enough to know that these directions mean nothing. I need TRAIN LINES! I need COLORS! I need DIRECTIONS! So I followed the signs to the metro, found a map and embellished my directions a little bit. I wrote down the name of the airport (could be helpful for getting back..), the names/colors of the lines and the last stop for each line.

Helpful directions! Note parts in blue were provided to me by the representative. I figured it might also be helpful to know the parts in black. 

At this point, I figured it would also be helpful to have the map in its entirety, so I stepped back and snapped a picture. Always on my phone for reference. This started a bit of a fad amongst all the tourists who were furiously copying down “drawings” of the different lines, and I became popular. This is why I love travelling…I make friends so much more easily than I do at home.

Istanbul Metro System...how hard can it be?
(Answer: Not nearly as hard as NYC...)

And then…of course…the ticket machine…I walked over to it, assessed the situation, and figured I’d might as well try. Two girls came running up to me as I walked up to one (guess even after all that googling, I still looked like a tourist…) and asked me if I knew how to use the machine.

“Well I just figured I’d put this 10 dollar note [note: I called Turkish currency “dollars” for this entire day because, although I had bought some at Logan, I did not know the actual name for it] in the machine and see what happens.”

I swear, I could not imagine travelling if I was so risk averse as to not try pressing buttons on a ticket machine at the airport metro. Anyways…one coin and 3 plastic tokens popped out.

I put one of the plastic tokens into the gate and it popped open, and I was on my way to explore Turkey!

The Big City

Spent today in Kigali, the big city, to get my work visa and some extra pages in my passport. I had perhaps my first ever exposure to true bureaucracy…from Rwanda and the US.

First, I wasn’t able to get my work visa because we didn’t have a letter from our project director stating that we are replacing two American workers who will be leaving in the next year. We had letters updating the “volunteer inventory” for the organization, and other letters stating what exactly our duties would be at CCHIPs, but because CCHIPs at some point stated it wouldn’t hire more than a certain number of volunteers, our project director needed to explain that 2 others would be leaving…even though those records should be on file at the NGO office as well? I don’t really know…I can’t understand French that well. All I know is: no work visa.

And THEN the Americaland embassy that I was *so excited* to visit only allows American citizens in on Tuesdays and Fridays. Ugh.

At the beginning of the day, I thought this excitedly meant that we’d get to go back to Kigali in a week! By the end of the day I realized that Kigali is largely miserable and I’m not too excited to go back in a week. It’s hot and dirty and dusty and not fun and expensive and tiring…and I am most definitely now sick, so I’m going to blame it on Kigali.

After failing to accomplish anything on bureaucracy lane, we ran some errands for CCHIPs, which included mostly picking up office supplies. Marvin and I gaped at the prices of chairs and desks at a furniture store and refused to let our office manager purchase a filing cabinet that we insisted would be cheaper to buy at IKEA and then ship over here. I think that was my only true contribution to CCHIPs today though.

Then we had some FABULOUS Indian food for lunch. (I was psyched when I looked at the menu and realized that it was the same as Jewel of India. I was not psyched that they described their saag paneer as “chunks of cottage cheese”…the Jewel description just says “chunks of cheese”…which is much more appetizing.)

I was asleep in the back of the car before we even left the city and woke up when we pulled into the CCHIPs driveway. Sorry there’s not too much else to report…but the big city was just exhausting.

Website Update: there was a HUGE spike in website traffic yesterday! Like TEN TIMES as many hits as normal! Unfortunately…90% of those hits were from “robots”, so I’m not convinced that anybody visited? I hope to change it on Tuesday so give me ideas!