The last day in Istanbul, a friend was able to show me around a little in the Taksim Square area. After some lunch under the Galatta Bridge, and a nargile (a Turkish hookah), I was invited to join a group of expat teachers for a fancy dinner on the asian side of Istanbul - a fine finish to my stay in Turkey.
The public transport in Istanbul is very good, except that for some reason it stops running around midnight. Normally, it is very easy to catch the metro out to the bus station and/or the airport, both of which are well out of town. After midnight, however, the options are limited. This is a little frustrating since numerous flights seem to both arrive and depart at ridiculous hours of the night. In my case, I just missed the last metro so rather than spending $2.80 getting to the airport, I had to fork out $40 for a ride in a taxi - and even that required Joel to bargain in Turkish for me to get the 'day rate' for the taxi, whose fares go up by 50% after midnight.
Regardless, I had a good last day in Istanbul and made it to the airport without any further trouble. Unfortunately, this still involved a lot of waiting around for the actual flight, and then I had to wait around for another 6 hours in Frankfurt so I wasn't expecting to get much sleep.
In the end, the finish of my trip was pretty draining:
* Overnight bus to Istanbul (got about 2 hours sleep)
* staying up all night in Istanbul getting to the airport and awaiting my flight.
* 6 hour layover in Frankfurt airport
* all day flight from Frankfurt to Vancouver (no sleep on this one either)
P.S.
I managed to maintain quite a bit of energy throughout this whole ordeal, but it started to catch up to me shortly after getting home.
I am writing this final entry from home as I have taken the day off sick today, and will probably need one more day to fully recover. (which is why I may not have gotten in touch with anyone since returning) I have posted a few more climbing photos, but have another set of non-climbing photos yet to upload. Will keep you posted.
- Ran
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Turkey blog: http://raninturkey.blogspot.com/
Turkey photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ran.guin/Turkey
Climbing photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ran.guin/ClimbingTurkey photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/ran.guin/Turkey
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"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
- GK Chesterton
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
- GK Chesterton
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