We got into downtown Istanbul around 8:30 AM local time, just after dawn because there's permanent DST. That's a total of 14.5 hours to get in between cities... Yikes. I get why all the time estimates were so high now despite the distances not actually being huge. I negotiated the nearby tram with all my bags; it was actually really hard to find one that had any space at all and I had to wait for a few to pass before getting one. I guess that's what I get for arriving during rush hour. I showed up at the hostel but was told that I couldn't check in, so I wandered around the city for a while before heading back. I think I found the apartment building we stayed at when I was first here in 2010. I'm impressed with my memory of this place - while the connective tissue of the city is largely unfamiliar to me (many of these big attractions south of the Golden Horn are much closer to one another than I'd remembered), my memories of the specific locations we spent time at seem to hold up very well. I immediately recognized that I'd stumbled into the old Hippodrome and predicted exactly where all the specific monuments would be once I walked in further. This is the first city on this trip that I've been to previously - I'd generally been targeting new places, but it's also interesting to reflect on how things have changed since I was 11. I wandered around the waterfront for a while and admired the city across the Bosphorous. It's really a gorgeous place and I'm loving being in a properly huge city again. I think that aside from New York, this is the biggest city I've ever been to.

I still couldn't check in once I got back to the hostel so I slept on a couch in the common area of the bar downstairs. Eventually they let us check in and I went to bed immediately. The room has a beautiful view of the sea of Marmara and I'm looking forward to waking up here. I slept until JP got into the city that evening, when I met up with him and we got dinner. The food was good but fairly pricey given the overall weakness of the Turkish economy and I think we'd be better trying to get food a little further outside the tourist areas in the future. The hostel doesn't have a kitchen, so that's not an option either. At least they do a complimentary breakfast thing that looks basic but solid. We walked around the city a little more before having a beer on the hostel's sea view balcony and then headed to bed. It was great to exchange stories and catch up on how things are going back in Boston - in some ways I think it's cool that I've been so disconnected, but I'm definitely looking forward to reintegrate with that lifestyle. It was also just nice to be speaking with someone who I know has such a fundamentally familiar perspective on life. I find that people in hostels skew toward being wildly adventurous and my experiences here often feel less exciting than they should because I know everyone around me has some much crazier version of my story, so it was validating to talk with JP about some of the things I've seen in Europe. I feel like I've adopted almost a separate identity on this trip, not because I misrepresent myself in any way, but because there's a certain set of customs and norms to hostel socialization that are very different from how I'd normally go about spending time with friends. With JP here, worlds are colliding in a way that they haven't really before. I guess maybe a little with Adam, but we weren't staying together in Berlin so it was somewhat different. Anyway, really glad we could make this work.

That said, I don't have all the time in the world anymore, and I think I might not be able to stay here as long as we'd intended now that I have a relatively firm deadline of being in Birmingham by the night of 17th. I knew this might be how things went down and so I've booked tickets for the train to Ankara Sunday morning and then that same afternoon to the big city of Kars in Turkey's far east. Just to Ankara is 5.5 hours, and then to Kars it's 26.5... wow. There's 3 hours in between those train rides so I'm now looking at a total of 35 hours of travelling just to get to a random little town that I don't especially want to be visiting. At least I was able to secure a bed for about $25. I think I'll spend one night in Kars and then take a bus to Georgia the following morning, though exactly where or how that can be done is largely unknown to me. I'm confident I'll meet other people doing the same thing though so I'm sure I'll be able to work something out, assuming Georgia hasn't devolved into civil war by then. I'd have liked to spend Sunday here with JP, but if I'm to see Georgia and/or Armenia I really don't have the time. He's leaving very early Monday morning anyway so that last night wouldn't be a big one. Still debating how to do the final leg of this trip, but it seems remarkably easy to fly to Birmingham from either Tbilisi or Yerevan. There are direct flights from both to Istanbul and then a bunch of direct flights to Birmingham from there. Georgia is of course my top priority (in part just because you literally can't go from Turkey to Armenia over land without going to Georgia first), but it's not a very big country and I'd love to be able to squeeze in Armenia as well. We'll see - flights are cheap enough now that I think I can get away with pushing the decision off a little longer. It's not my money, anyway.