Hoş Geldınız!

That's "welcome" to all you regular folks out there, and "velkommen" to you Decorah friends.  It has unbelievably been just three and half days since I left Decorah, but that time has seen several weeks' worth of airport waiting, plane sitting, language learning, and friend making. Today we added sightseeing to that list with a visit to the enormous mausoleum of Atatürk, the dearly beloved and legally sacrosanct founder of the modern Turkish Republic.  But that's for the next post. This one is about the 6,000 mile journey from Decorah to Ankara.

My family and I left Decorah at 3:30 AM, Sunday, September 4th.  We arrived at the Rochester, MN airport shortly before 5:00, and I proceeded to have the easiest international flight check-in of my life (probably speaking for the future here, too.)  No line.  About one minute of interaction.  And my bag for ten months weighed in at *exactly* 70 lbs, avoiding the jump from the $75 extra baggage fee for 50-70 lbs to the $200 fee for 71+ without an ounce to spare.  Score.

One last shot of the family before ten months apart. Or, "The smiliest we've ever been at 5 am."

After saying goodbye to the family, it was time to head through security and await the first of the four flights that would take me from our corner of the Upper Midwest to the capital city of Turkey.  The security procedure was also the easiest/nicest check I will ever go through for international travel, with a bushy mustached, cheery Minnesotan man cracking jokes as my bags and I passed through (no line again, of course) without a hitch.  After some confusion about the gate, which is odd for an airport with only four of them, I was on the plane and bound for adventure.

A quick note here about the first flight: our path from Rochester to Detroit took us over Wisconsin and crossed the southern edge of Lake Winnebago.  I had the good fortune to be seated on the left, north-facing side of the plane. Consequently, I was able to simultaneously see my grandfather's farm east of Appleton, my mother's hometown of Manitowoc, and the entire Lake Winnebago-to-Lake Michigan area inhabited by all my maternal relatives/ancestors for the last two centuries.  Very cool.

This is where half my genes come from (Lake Winnebago is under the wing by now).

The Detroit to New York flight was uneventful, so I'll skip ahead to the most exciting part of the first day: meeting the first of my fellow Fulbrighters at JFK Int'l Airport.  After an hour and a half or so of suspicious glances at every solo twenty-something in the area of our gate, two people (they soon turned out to be named Julia and Ramsay) finally introduced each other.  It was on, as they say.  I immediately got off the phone and joined them, and within a half hour or so there were ten to fifteen of us doing introductions.  The fun thing in all of this is that many of us already knew each other thanks to two months' Facebook communicating - there was very little hesitancy in jumping right into wisecracking camaraderie as we boarded the flight to Istanbul.

It was roughly ten hours from JFK to Istanbul: not horrific, but certainly long enough on Delta.  The staff was kind and the flight uneventful, but British Airways/KLM/Luftansa/Emirates/all the Asian carriers they are not.  But fun news for my sister Kari, a big Kate Hudson fan: one of the three in-flight movies (on a big screen because they didn't have seatback screens, losers) was "Something Borrowed." So that was nice.  Anyway, after several hours of talking to my Turkish twenty-something seat partner Barak, movie watching, failing to sleep, and dining on not-that-bad airline food, we got our first glimpse of Turkey.

Istanbul was Constantinople. This picture is actually from our flight out to Ankara, but, same view.

We had several hours in the Istanbul airport, my fourth of the trip, in which to go through immigration and customs (the latter consisted of walking through a giant doorway that said "proceed here if you have nothing to claim," so, that was hilariously easy and I should have smuggled in some whiskey), get our tickets for the domestic flight to Ankara, withdraw some Turkish Liras from the ATM, and meet even more new people.  It was during "meet even more new people" that the wave of travel fatigue and lack of sleep finally hit me, accelerated by the half liter glass of beer I had with new friend Anika while using the wireless of an airport restaurant.  After a little food and a couple cat naps I was back among the living, and remained there long enough to fly to Ankara, get our baggage (this was a small ordeal but ended well), share a taxi to the hotel, eat supper, and crawl into bed where I slept nine hours without waking.  Jet lag nothing.

Next up: our visit to Atatürk's mausoleum and the War of Independence Museum.  Til then, güle güle!