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We*re ın Istanbul, not Constantinople

Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

It 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!

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Caves, Baths, and Dracula

Friday, July 15th, 2005

Our day of caving turned out to be so much fun in Budapest. We nearly missed the trip, though, when we realized that the meeting point was at a different train station than we originally thought. We had to sprint (as always) to the tram and jump on without a ticket and hope that we wouldn’t get stopped. It turned out all right in the end though, and we met up with the group and went by bus to the caves. We got to wear these incredibly sexy caving jumpsuits that were caked in about an inch of dried mud. The cave expedition was so much fun. It was pretty tough at times, and more than once I looked at a hole that I was supposed to go through and I thought to myself, you want me to do what? All of us made it through, a bit bruised about the knees, but we had a great time and met some really nice people.

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