Travel

December 16th:

It's about 2:00 PM and we just got in to our room at the Best Western here in Istanbul. The trip was horrendous.

Airplane:

Partway through the trip, they served what's apparently called kahve, a thick, black coffee. I almost gagged! It tasted horrible! Later in the trip, they started speaking in Turkish as well as English. I realized how unprepared I was to go to this foreign country. I couldn't understand a word of it. My wife and I had bought Drive Time Turkish so that we could listen to it in the car and try to learn some of Turkey's official language, but obviously it didn't pay off.
Airport:
When we arrived, we had to wait on the tarmac for forever! When we finally got off, I got a pleasant surprise when I exchanged my money. We had brought one thousand dollars to exchange for the Turkish Lira, but we got 1,200 Lira back instead! I realized later that this was because the exchange rate is one American dollar to 1.2 Turkish Lira. We took a short airport shuttle ride to the hotel, and then were able to get to our room and collapse.