[sorry, no pictures in this section. bear with me :-)

In the morning, we said our goodbyes and hopped a train back to London, to catch our flight to Turkey. We checked in, and planted ourselves in the Heathrow departure lounge. Heathrow's lounge is vast, and almost as mall-like as the Charlotte airport, and they make you wait there forever, not telling you your gate number until right before your flight boards (presumably in an effort to get you to buy more crap at the duty-free extravaganza - we resisted, for the most part). Here we met up with our fourth travel companion, Castor. Finally, they called our flight, and we boarded the plane and we're on the way to *Turkey*! Woohoo! (The plane was an Airbus. Luckily, no significant parts fell off en route.) Turkish Airlines has this strange concept of climate control - the little airflow thingies that, on U.S. flights, merely jet out cold air seemed to alternate cold and hot, causing the cabin temperature to fluctuate wildly. Maybe they were just trying to acclimate us for warmer Turkish weather? They helpfully gave all the flight announcements in both Turkish and English - a good thing, since even after getting my handy little Turkish phrasebook the only thing I'd managed to learn was the first four numbers (bir, iki, yeuch, and durt, if you're wondering - helped by Bena's handy mnemonic: beer, icky, yuck, and dirt). Turkish is a hard language to learn (at least for English-speakers) as it's non-Indo-European (most closely related to Hungarian and Finnish) and has almost no cognates with English other than borrowed words. And it doesn't have articles or prepositions or similar kinds of stuff - they just stick endings onto the words to convey meaning.

Anyway, the flight was relatively uneventful, though it got a bit bumpy towards the end, and it seemed like we were on approach to Istanbul for ages (long, bumpy ages). But finally, we touched down (none too gently), and disembarked into the Istanbul Airport. After claiming the luggage, we headed out to find our tour group. By the way, if you're ever in the market for an eclipse tour (they do other themes of tours too) to faraway places I can heartily recommend them:
Explorers Tours (http://www.explorers.co.uk)

Finally Mehmet the tour guide managed to corral all us pasty-faced Brits and Yanks, and we got onto the tour bus headed for our hotel.

At first glance Istanbul by night seems like just another big modern city, till you start paying more attention. The mosques - there are mosques everywhere (9000, which really isn't that many considering the 18 million Moslems in Istanbul). Big ones, little ones, old ones, *really* old ones - all with at least one minaret and its accompanying loudspeakers (apparently they don't do the calls to prayer by voice power anymore - though I heard that after the earthquake and the resulting power failures, they had to again). Crossing over the little sliver of water known as the Golden Horn, we passed some really big, grand mosques, all lit up and absolutely beautiful - Mehmet pointed out a few of the more famous ones, like the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque and the Suleymaniye Mosque. Wow - we sure ain't in Kansas anymore, Toto.

One big advantage of a tour is that they take care of details like checking into the hotel and shlepping up your baggage - it was sure nice not to haul around all that stuff for a week. While waiting for the incredibly slow elevator, I had one of those truth-is-definitely-stranger-than-fiction moments: I heard someone call my name: "Jean Richter, is that you?" I turned around and saw a vaguely-familiar-looking woman a bit younger than me. Recognition dawned when she told me her name - it was Clare Bolfing, who was my assistant briefly back nine years ago when I first started my current job. Turns out she had booked a spot on the same tour as me. It was so bizarre that we should meet up halfway around the world after not having seen each other in nine years. For those of you reading this that might remember her, there's a picture of her on the Kapadokya page, later on in the narrative.

We found our room, cranked up the air conditioning, which worked well despite the constant sound of water trickling (must be the humidity), and settled down to go to sleep. Bonnie dropped off right away, but I just couldn't, and lay awake listening to the water trickle out of the air conditioner for hours.

On to more adventures in Istanbul (with pictures)