turkey I

i made it to the bus station in a taxi, found the right bus to get on, made it to the airport, rather randomly saw someone i knew there, and flew to turkey!

i was amused when i got to the airport (in china) to find myself surprised that there were so many foreigners there.

i was also amused when i tried to order dinner at a fast food place at the airport by the usual method in china of pointing desperately and using whatever useful chinese word i can think of. it turns out the people in the airport speak english.

it was also interesting to stand in line to check in with many many turkish people. it's strange after hearing chinese so long, which is starting to sound familiar, to hear a language that is completely unfamiliar. i couldn't even understand one word! funny that it was surprising to not understand a language that i wasn't supposed to understand. and then on the airplane, all the announcements were in turkish, sometimes in english. the movies were also in turkish, with chinese subtitles! not so helpful to me...

when i got to turkey, it was 5:30 AM, and i had sort of slept on the airplane (i had a window seat next to a guy who didn't move the entire flight until the last hour), and my next flight wasn't even up on the screen yet because i had to wait for 6 hours for it. so i fell asleep on top of my backpack for awhile since there were a bunch of other asleep people that early in the airport.

when i took off from istanbul to fly to budapest, it was awesome to istanbul from the air. i get surprised by cities that aren't flat. and there were so many boats in the ocean, and islands. and i sat next to a couple who had been living in saudi arabia, were speaking hungarian, the wife was from hungary and the husband from oregon, they were on their way to hungary for christmas, but would be living in england afterwards, and they had a cat with them.

words will have to suffice to describe my vacation since my camera was lost/stolen. =( i'm very sad about the pictures on my camera that were lost of people i just said good-bye to who i will probably never see again, and the pictures that i already would've taken if i had my camera. i can borrow pictures from other people, but it's not the same. but the story of the lost camera is for the second post. there's about two posts before i get to today, but right now i'm in romania!