Adventures By Design

As has become our habit, we woke up to darkness at our usual time of 2 am, and lounged about pretending to sleep until 4:00. Soon after, our alarm sounded: the Muslim call to prayer. At around this time we decided it was decent to be awake so we turned on the lights and Ric got out his book. He’s been hoping to finish it before we leave tonight so that he can change it for a new one at our hotel. Gin eschewed her book in favor of the hotel’s free wifi. We still had no place to stay in Cairo when we arrived at 2am tomorrow. Gin searched for a while, checked her email, send a message to Ryan to see if Inca was doing okay, and found a hotel that looked nice, but didn’t have an instant online booking system. She sent a message to the hotel owner asking for a room for tonight, crossed her fingers, and proceeded to check her Facebook.

Eventually the time had reached the late hour of 8:30, so we decided to get ready and go down for breakfast.

We woke up pretty early today (to be expected since we went to bed around 4pm yesterday) and headed downstairs for breakfast. The hotel manager had told us that breakfast was anytime between 8 and 12, but when we arrived at just after 8 he was only beginning to get things ready. He seemed a bit embarrassed about the situation, but we just enjoyed some coffee while we waited for him.

We arrived in Istanbul early this morning and, after paying an extortionate $60 each for a visa, got through the airport with no problems. The hotel we’re staying at (Apricot Hotel) had arranged an airport pickup for us, and though we had arrived nearly 2 hours late a man was faithfully waiting with a sign with our names on it.

We woke up this morning at 8 to get ready to go on our trip. We had to finish (start) packing and get Inca’s stuff ready before bringing her over to Ryan and Maggie’s house for her vacation with Addie, the Golden Retriever. Unfortunately we didn’t really get going at 8, due to a bit of celebrating with our Aussie friends Mark/Lyndal and Nadine/Michael the evening before. Indeed, we had just finish teaching yesterday so we needed to mark the occasion somehow. Michael and Nadine had never been to a Korean restaurant before, so we took them to our favorite one, Sorabol, where the owner is in love with Gin and always gives us free stuff. Of course anytime we have Korean (or hang out with Mark and Lyndal, or both) we have to have some drinks and last night was no exception. So this morning Gin was feeling pretty rotten and didn’t really get going until 10ish.

Once we finally got everything ready we brought Inca, with her attendant baggage over to Ryan and Maggie’s. Their dog, Addie, and Inca get on really well and always have a blast playing. The humans watching them usually get a little worried by Addie’s habit of sitting on Inca, but we know that Inca’s quick enough to get out of the way before being squished. We brought some toys for Inca, along with her food and blanket, but we’re pretty sure that Addie will be all the toy she needs. We wonder when they’ll stop playing, or if it’ll continue for the entire two weeks we’ll be gone?

After dropping off Inca we had a quick lunch and then headed home to grab our bags and catch our ride to the airport. Since Suzhou is a small Chinese city (of 6 million people) it doesn’t have it’s own airport and we had to head to Shanghai. It’s meant to be a 1 ½ – 2 hour drive, so we left at 4 for our flight at 8:30. The owner of the company we hired our driver from thought we should go at 5, but we’re really glad we insisted on 4. On the way to the airport we ran into no less than 3 massive traffic jams, and we didn’t arrive until 6:45. As we got close our driver asked us which of the two terminals we needed, and of course we had no idea so we gambled on Terminal 1. As these things go we obviously chose the wrong terminal so we then had to catch a shuttle to the other one. At this point we decided that next time we were leaving for the airport 6 hours early.

Finally, after realizing that Ric had forgotten his wallet (at least it wasn’t his passport!) we managed to check in for our flight and clear security. When we tried to go through passport control though they motioned us way down to the end of the hall where we completely skipped immigration. Apparently we were going to have to get off our plane in Beijing to take care of that… groan.

Miraculously we still had a little time to kill before our flight so we grabbed a quick snack, checked out the disappointing selection at the bookstore, and ran into another teacher from our school, Jarrett, on his way to India, before finding out that our flight had been delayed and they would let us know the revised departure time ‘soon.’ We were a little worried about that, but it turned out to be only about a 10 minute delay and we were soon on our way.

The stop in Beijing was predictably miserable as we had to get off the plane, collect new boarding passes, get shuttled across the chilly tarmac, go through immigration, then back through security, and for a hike across the airport, before getting back onto the exact same plane and back to our exact same seats. Cynical thoughts of Communist Chinese efficiency came to mind.

After that we were finally on our way to Turkey, Gin was exhausted and slept for the entire flight, while Ric nearly finished his book. Next stop, Istanbul!