Taxing Trip

I am back! Back to blogging and back in Turkey! After arriving back in Hawler on the 5th, I spent a very busy, but equally rewarding 2 weeks before returning to Turkey. "Why would I go all the way back to Erbil for only two weeks and then come back to Turkey?" you might ask? The truth is, I had committed myself to a program involving local teachers... something exciting since I rarely come into close contact with local people who are not language teachers or taxi drivers. So I now know 8 very special local teachers from 4 different districts of Kurdistan (Germian, Sulemani, Hawler and Dohuk) with whom I explored English education in Kurdistan. At the end of our 5-day program, we accomplished a lot... ande I have plans to meet up with those teachers again when I return.

But more on that later. The point of this post is to tell you about the trip. It was unbelievable. At midnight on August 16th, a taxi met me at the Edge and we drove to the border (Ibrahim Khalil). Unfortunately, the driver decided to take a little break for some food at about 3 in the morning in Shehan (a name you may recognize due to recent violence in the region). The driver went into a restaurant full of men and I waited in the car for 30 minutes! I was getting a bit edgy (and not because all the men kept looking into the car). We reached the border at about 4 and we promtly found another person who needed to go to Diyarbakir and we went through passport control and baggage checks... but it appeared the other guy was carrying BIG MONEY! BIg money = big problem as you have to register this with the police. (That took another 40 minutes). Anyway, after two hours at the border (although there were almost no cars), we were through into Turkey. As you might have guessed, the two men were hungry and stopped for breakfast assuring me that I would catch my plane no problem. In fact, I did... I arrived at 9:40 for my 9:55 flight. From there it was on to Istanbul, and Istanbul to Kaiseri. In Kaiseri, I took another cab and drove the 90km to the Goreme Otogar to arrive exactly at 4:00 (the arranged meeting time). But I am STILL trying to catch up on the sleep lost on this day!