We*re ın Istanbul, not Constantinople
Wednesday, July 20th, 2005It ıs morning here ın Istanbul and I am tired and this keyboard is completely messed up. I cannot find the apostrophe key, so I will not be usiıng any contractions. The i key ıs somewhere equally difficult to find, but as it is hard to avoid using it, I think this will necessarily have to be a short entry. Already this has taken me almost fıve minutes to type.
We never made it to Varna as we found out it would take as long to get there as it would to just go straight on to Istanbul, which is what we did. The train took over 24 hours to get from Bucharest to here. The Bulgarian border patrol was a nightmare, and gettıng a visa at the Turkish side took time, but it was worth it in the end. I was even asked to smuggle a bag of mystery contents across the border by a gypsy…how exciting!