After a couple of frustrating setbacks, my visa arrived on
Thursday, which meant I had to leave the country over the weekend in order to
come back in on the right visa.
So, on Wednesday, I bought another ticket to Baku. I’d
gotten a tracking number for my visa and knew when it landed in Istanbul, so I
counted on it getting to me on Thursday. I picked Baku because it was the
second cheapest available. Cyprus was really my first choice, but after talking
to the visa expert at the office, I changed my mind.
Cyprus, for which the ticket was only $100, is split up into
two sections: a Turkey section and a Greek section. Even though it’s another
country, apparently Cyprus Turkey doesn’t really count for leaving Turkey. And,
according to my visa person, some of the Turkish immigration people don’t count
Greek Cyprus as leaving Turkey, either. And I didn’t want to get called out on
a technicality, so to Baku I went.
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| Loved this in Baku. Scene from the beach club |
Last time I flew Azeri air, which was a codeshare flight
with Turkish Airlines, so this time I went straight to the Turkish airlines
flight and got the flight. I thought I got about the same flight as I did
before, but realized it landed about an hour after my other one did, at 2:30
a.m. I opted to come back earlier than I
did the time before, at 2:40 or so. Figured I’d take the metro there, like I
did last time.
Friday, I got an email to check in online and in doing so, I
realized I did not get the same outgoing flight as before. It wasn’t even from
the same airport! Istanbul has two airports, one on the Europe side and one on
the Asia side. I’d intended to go from the Europe side. I didn’t even know the
Asia side one had international flights, but apparently so.
So Friday at work, I had to do a mad scramble to get
transportation, as there’s no easy public transportation to that Airport. And,
doing the backwards math and in the whole “state of emergency” that Turkey is
in right now, I had to be at the airport three hours before the flight. So that’s
8 p.m. And it can take 1-2 hours to get to that airport. I had to meet the car
at 6 p.m. for an 11 p.m. flight.
It took an hour and a half to get there, and then my flight
wound up being just over an hour late. I got to the hotel at 4 a.m. I was
meeting up with a friend the next day, and although she’d offered to let me
stay there that night, too, I declined, figuring I didn’t want to wake them up.
Now I am even more glad I didn’t do that. Getting in at 3 a.m. is bad enough,
but 4 a.m. is pretty much criminal. I
basically brushed my teeth and fell into bed.
Met my friend the next day and spent from 1 p.m. to about 6
p.m. at a beach club. This is a big thing in Baku, and there are many to choose
from. Sadly, the first one we chose didn’t let us in. Baku, as noted before, is new to the whole
capitalism thing and the place we went to – lots of water slides – said it was
open only to hotel guests plus 50 people from the public. Apparently we were
Nos. 51-54 because they refused to let us go in, even though the place was way,
way dead. The guy kept saying it was “crowded,” but it barely had anyone in it.
Honestly, we thought the guy was joking, but he wasn’t.
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| Sample mover box. |
So we went to another place right on the sea. It was
gorgeous and we just lazed around, alternating between the pool, the beach
chair and the Caspian Sea. Those are some fantastic options.
The plan was to leave that place, go back to the apartment to
change clothes and then go to a party that someone was throwing. We got a
little delayed and got to the party around 10 p.m. We’d heard it went to 11
p.m., so we weren’t rushed or anything.
One of the guys there had been at the beach club, and we
chatted a little more. He asked when I was leaving and I said 2:30. He asked if
I’d brought my bag with me and I said no, the flight was at 2:30 p.m., not a.m.
Well.
We left shortly thereafter – the party broke up and we were
hungry – and once home, I decided to check my flight time just in case. I had
this visual of the printed itinerary in my brain and realized my original
departure from Istanbul had been written as 22:50 but my departure from Baku
said 2:40, not 14:40.
I searched for the flight number and sure enough, the flight
was leaving in three hours, not 13. Thank God that guy said something, or I
would have missed my flight.
That flight was on time, but I was so exhausted. I’d pretty
much had an all-nighter on Friday night, and once again I was on a plane when I’d
rather be sleeping. I do not sleep well on planes, but I did my best.
We landed right on time, but that was still 4:30 a.m. Man.
Rough. But there was no line in the diplomatic lane and it didn’t take long at
all to get the official stamp. Boy, I had been waiting a long time for that
stamp.
I was at the metro at 5 a.m. Unfortunately, I learned that
the metro doesn’t open until 6 a.m., so I turned back around, went to the
domestic gate and grabbed a cap. I crawled into bed at 6 a.m., after pulling
down these electrical blind things. They totally blacked out the room and I
slept like a rock until 11 a.m.
My less-than-24 hour trip to Baku was wonderful but it was
nice to have almost a whole Sunday to unpack my shipments, which came on Monday
and Tuesday.
Part of the fun in unpacking is figuring out where the heck
the movers put stuff. Seriously, until I opened the next-to-the-last box, I
honestly thought the little cedar chest I got for my high school graduation had
gone missing. It wasn’t in any of the logical boxes, like the other ones from
the desk. For some reason, the movers stuck it in a box clearly marked “CDs and
DVDs.” (There were no CDs.)
I was so happy it was in there, though. I’d really pretty
much resigned to it being MIA, so I was thrilled to see it. It had my postage
stamps and batteries in there, but it was the box I really would have missed. I’ve
had the thing almost 30 years!
Got another surprise in unpacking, too. The lid to the
laundry basket from Guangzhou – which was owned by the apartment complex –was
in there. Not the laundry basket itself, just the lid.
What I didn’t get was some stuff I’d hoped to get from
storage in DC. The project I wanted to do this time around was to put my CDs into
MP3s to store on a hard drive. I did this before Peace Corps, but the hard
drive failed and I lost about a third of my music. I’ve spent a couple of years
without Tim McGraw, and I very much looked forward to liberating the actual
disks from storage so I could re-burn them.
I wanted the disks, Evelyn’s KitchenAid mixer and my dishes.
I didn’t bring those to Guangzhou because I was still in Peace Corps mode: I packed
what I needed to use in the next two years. The thing is, even though Foreign
Service is two or three years at a time, it’s not Peace Corps. It’s your
legitimate job until retirement, and you should bring everything with you that
you want and not do without it.
So I really wanted the mixer and the dishes, and to get
them, I went back to the original inventory I got from the movers (2013) and
tried to select all the boxes except the ones that had “décor” (I have a slew
of framed photos) “books” or looked like they were furniture.
And in the 200 pounds of stuff I got, the mixer, dishes and
CDs were NOT among them. My scrapbooks and the Pepsi crates that once held the
CDs were among them, go figure.
So I have two more years without Tim McGraw, but plenty of
Pepsi crates.
But at least I've settled in.
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