Departures & Arrivals (Houston/Frankfurt/Istanbul)

Departures & Arrivals (Houston/Frankfurt/Istanbul)

This is a terrible airport. It’s not like I want to start off with a complaint, but O’Hare apparently really spoils you. Houston’s international terminal is kind of dead. When I arrived from Little Rock this morning, it was a ghost town. It was creepy. The shops were closed and the passengers were gone – it was just me and a few employees wandering around aimlessly.

The man next to me is talking on the phone about some people he met that were from Switzerland. According to him, the mother spoke to the children in “Swiss.” It reminds me of the ordeal I went through with a customer service agent at Bank of America when I tried to notify them of my departure from the United States. I don’t exactly know my travel plans after I finish teaching , so I told him every country I might possibly visit: Syria, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. He repeated back to me: “Sierra, Greece, Bull-jeer-ia, and uh…Roman…Romania…is that like a state?” I had to spell the names of the countries for him. I’ll admit that Bulgaria and Romania might be a little obscure but he should have known about Syria. In fact, since he worked in the department specifically dedicated to handling issues about using your account overseas he should have known all of them!

While waiting on my flight, I’ve completed a few assignments for the online class I have, read and responded to long-neglected e-mails and caught up with my friends Roxanne and Samir. Talking to Samir, my best friend from high school, made me realize how much of a crap friend I can be. Every scrap of news we discussed was like a revelation to me because of how long and how much I’ve been out of contact with him. I just suck at picking up the telephone and calling someone. It’s like I have an aversion to the phone. It makes me wonder what’s happened to me over the years that’s made me hate the phone.

I’m probably being tough on myself. It’s hard to constantly maintain friendships over long distances, and the truly great, strong friendships endure anyway.

I don’t like saying goodbye. If there’s any part of me that’s unwilling to go to Turkey, it’s that part. The part that says you shouldn’t leave people behind, even though it’s not really leaving them behind. No matter how many times you say “Goodbye!” or “I’ll miss you!” or “I’ll be back in only two months!” it still doesn’t seem like it’s really enough. So you hope they read this and they know how much you’ve truly come to care for them. And though intercontinental travel is irritating in how it can interrupt things, it’s only a temporary interruption. You really will be back soon, and then things move on again!

For whatever reason, my phone was continually acting up in Houston. I don’t mind AT&T’s crappy network dropping my calls every once in awhile, but it always makes a habit of dropping them when I really, really need to make the call. I can BS with someone on the phone for 2 hours but then the second that I need to make some sort of pressing call, it’s all “beep, beep, beep”s. I was forced to resort to texting, which is a poor substitute.

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The flight would have been fine if I didn’t have a family of eight split up with half in front of me and half in back of me. I have never seen such poorly behaved children in all my life. They were crawling on the seats, they’d run up and down the aisles, they’d stop and literally yell into your ear in Arabic and they’d make an awful habit of using our armrest for a balance beam. A few hours into the flight, I just couldn’t take it anymore so I went to complain to the flight attendants. The first one just smiled and nodded, then his colleague asked what was going on. After a brief explanation in German, she comes over to me and says quietly: “Yes, we would like to kill them, but we cannot. We are over the ocean, and we cannot remove them! Please, take these chocolates for your stress. You go back, you sit down put on your headphones, you turn to channel 3 – very nice classical music – and we will be in Frankfurt soon.” They gave me business class meals and special treatment, so I guess it made up for it!

My layover in Frankfurt was just long enough to feel bothersome but not long enough to be able to leave the airport. I have a slightly longer layover on the way back, so maybe I can take a quick 2 hour tour of the city. I’m already slamming up against the language barrier in Germany of all places – what’s Turkey going to be like!? Also, I’ve become so accustomed to using the Internet at will that my non-working iPhone is flipping me out. The nice thing about Frankfurt is the European take on security scanning: try to stuff as much stuff as possible into those trays rather than being forced to use a separate one for each item.

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I don’t know what I was doing on the flight to Istanbul. I wasn’t sleeping, but I was awake. I think I was just unconscious in my seat. Customs was a madhouse! It was like ten different flights had arrived at the same time. I changed some money and headed to the Metro, Istanbul’s version of a subway. This is where I hit the first of many language speed bumps (let’s not call them barriers). The lady they had stationed at the help desk for the subway at the INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT didn’t speak a lick of English. I know as an American and an English-speaker I can’t just go around demanding everyone in the world speak English, but it’s the closest thing we have to an international language!

I switched from the subway to the tram (they’re two different systems – don’t ask me) and finally arrived at the nearest stop to my hotel. This is where all my advanced planning crumbled like…I don’t know…some Byzantine ruin (you can throw a rock in this city and expect to hit something historic). Here are the directions I wrote for myself: turn right and go south. Those are the worst directions in the world. Turn right from what, Bryan? How can you go south when you don’t know which direction is which because the sun has gone down? Cursing myself, I asked about 5 different shopkeepers, hit 5 language speed bumps and they sent me in 5 different directions. Finally I found an Internet café where the owner spoke English and he directed me to a kebap restaurant that was three buildings down from the hotel. However, not bothering to look around, I just asked and got a good laugh from a owner. Yes, sir, I am blind.

The place I’m staying is like a combination of a hotel & hostel. There are dorm rooms and things and then private rooms. I have a private room with a shared bath, which I don’t mind. However, there seem to be a few things I may have forgotten about hostels. Here are some tips for if you ever find yourself in a hotel/hostel:

Tip #1: Always bring a towel, otherwise you’ll be drying yourself with your own clothes.

Tip #2: In the late afternoon/evening, the young person manning the desk does not care about you. The owner has gone home, and there’s no one to hold this young punk accountable for his poor customer service. So arrive in the morning or midday.

Tip #3: Whichever adaptor plug you didn’t bring is going to be the one that you need, even if it says it’s only used in Indonesia or some ridiculous place like that. Because by God you better believe that there’s a strong chance the building you’re in has some freak backstory for why they have Indonesian electrical outlets.

Tip #4: There will be only one electrical plug to use for your laptop, fan, medical device, camera charger and phone charger, and no one within a 5 block radius will be selling one or be capable of understanding what the hell a multi-plug adaptor is. So bring your own.

Tip #5: Keep things in perspective. Even if you’re in the middle of a warzone, at least you have a bed and a pillow. And sometimes sheets. But sometimes not. Perspective, man.

Tip #6: Backpackers and the like should be taken in small doses.

Tip #7: Don't travel alone!

Tomorrow, Insha'Allah, I go to Edirne. Pray for me!