Hi blog. The past few days of travel have been chaotic but so much fun. When we first departed from Olduvai Gorge, we drove straight to Arusha to move our luggage from the cars onto a bus. The car I was in was having an issue getting fuel to the engine, and it broke down every few minutes. It had a lot of trouble getting up the escarpment of the Ngorongoro crater. When we reached Arusha, we moved all of our stuff onto the bus and continued on to the border crossing to get into Kenya.
When we arrived at the border crossing, we had to go through so many security and visa checkpoints. The official border control people were pulling a scam where if you didn’t have your yellow international vaccine card on you, you were required to buy a forged one for $50 from them. No vaccines were given, and the cards were official (forged) vaccine cards, which is a crazy souvenir to have.
We continued to drive to Nairobi after the border crossing, and it was chaotic. The lanes very rarely have lane markers anywhere in Tanzania or Kenya, and it was stressing me out. I could never drive there, I would crash every day. We got to our hotel in Nairobi in the middle of the night and went to bed.
We woke up only a few hours later to go to the Nairobi airport. Vivian got food poisoning from the hotel restaurant, so I felt awful for her. She was trying not to vomit as we were going through security. We barely made it to our gate in time, and we headed to Istanbul.
Looking at Istanbul from the sky was weird because there were clusters of about 50 large buildings that all looked identical. After landing, we headed to our hotel, which was very fancy. We were happy to be spending a night in luxury. After we dropped off our stuff, we headed into the city to explore. Before getting on the metro, we had to use the ATM to get some spending money for the day. The ATM ended up “capturing” my debit card without giving me any money, so I was not very happy. I hate Istanbul ATMs, never ever use them.
We traveled to the Grand Bazaar, which was the most stressful casual shopping experience I have ever had. Carina and I walked through it together. Every storefront was full of flashy, expensive stuff that we were not interested in buying. I am not about to buy a $100 gold ring in Istanbul, I didn’t even have spending money on me. If you looked in the direction of a store or a salesman, they would try to trap you and force you to buy something, so we would just look at the ground, which was not an effective way to search for souvenirs. All the salespeople would assume we spoke English and start speaking it to us whenever they saw us, so we decided to start speaking in Swahili back to them. Carina said that this was like the springbok from Africa — whenever the springbok is face-to-face with a predator, it jumps vertically to confuse the predator. The salespeople were definitely confused, and it worked pretty often in getting them to stop talking to us.
^Everyone touching all the street cats in Istanbul
After visiting the Grand Bazaar, we walked over the the square in front of the Hagia Sophia. There were at least four mosques around the square, so there must be some stiff competition when recruiting people to choose one over the other to worship at.
^Carina in the Hagia Sophia square
After visiting the square, we went to dinner at a nice place in the old town. We had a bunch of bread and meat, and we couldn’t finish the meal because we were all stuffed. We went back to the hotel afterwards and stuffed fourteen people in one taxi, which was so much fun.
^The meat dinner we weren’t able to finish
The following morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and then went to the Istanbul airport to go home. Carina, Enoch, and I wandered around, and Enoch bought a couple of Turkish delights as gifts. Carina bought a coffee that she hated, and the three of us had lunch together. Enoch bought the most overpriced Popeyes that we had ever seen in our lives, and Carina finally had a burgerler (Turkish for “burger”, what a fun word).
Missing everyone,
Kacey
