New York to Kiev to Istanbul Flight

Woohoo! We're in Istanbul!! It only took about 20 hours, but we made it safe and sound. :)

Our flight was supposed to leave at midnight, but without any reason or notification, it was changed to 12:30 (not a delay, it just said that's the departure time) and then we didn't actually leave until around 1:30am. Needless to say, we were tired, so we tried to sleep most of the way there.

Isa was especially tired, since she was murdered just a few hours earlier (at a murder mystery party at PJ and Courtney's house).

We took Ukraine International Airlines because Isa found a ridiculous deal. Their staff at JFK was awful. No announcements, no information, just confusion. Even boarding over an hour after our flight was supposed to leave, the board still said it was departing on time. :/ We also didn't really care for the people on our plane, and from other various experiences throughout the flight, we completely scratched Ukraine off our list of places to go to. Ever. 

The food was decently good though.

It took us 9 hours to get from JFK to Kiev, where (thanks to our delay) we didn't have to wait very long for our next flight to Istanbul. And part of that was spent getting the runaround at their international transfer desk (which it seemed was just there to look at our boarding pass and tell us, "Yes, you are not staying here, indeed you are going to another country." which we totally could have told them ourselves).

In Boryspil Airport in Kiev, they had decals on mirrors which were fun to play with.

Most of them were only a few feet off the ground, so I'm thinking they're for kids. Or maybe Ukrainians are just short.

The flight to Istanbul was a quick 2-hour flight. I was very excited to fly over Istanbul at night and use our new Canon G7X because it takes fantastic low-light pictures.

Until I looked at a map and found out that's not Istanbul at all. :(

We got Turkish Lira from the airport ATM and found the Metro. All the machines were out of IstanbulKarts (their metrocards) which I was really upset about. It was late (about 10:30pm at this poitn), I hadn't slept much, and having to buy tokens for each ride almost doubled the cost of the ride (albeit just $1 more). So we bought tokens at 4 lira a pop (about $1.33 now) and took the metro from the airport to Zeytinburnu (20 minutes), then switched to the tram/lightrail (another 4 lira token) from there into Sultanahmet, the center of old town Istanbul (30 minutes from Zeytinburnu). The whole public transportation route cost us under $3 each and took just under an hour, which is much better than going into New York from JFK.

It only took us a few minutes to find our hotel (Edibe Sultan). We are very happy with our choice.

We were pretty hungry, so we wandered out just before midnight looking for food.

It was good! Or maybe we were just really hungry. 

We sat and ate our Doner Et Kebaps (we think et means meat, and they spell kebab "kebap" here, weird) on a bench looking at Hagia Sophia.

So excited to be here!

Here's a video of today's adventure:

Maho Beach St. Maarten (Airport Beach)

Maho Beach was the only thing I wanted to accomplish while visiting St. Maarten because it is one of the most unique beaches in the world. There's nothing particularly amazing about the sand or the water (although both are surprisingly great and an added bonus). For Maho, it's all about location. And that location is basically on the runway.

Watching the planes fly just barely overhead is a lot of fun. And trying to time a picture of the moving plane behind you while not looking at it is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. But luckily there are quite a few small planes landing and taking off to give you practice.

But the most fun is when the big jets take off.

Happy SXM Day!

No, not S and M. SXM. It stands for St. Maarten. And today was his day.

So first, some history. Because nobody I asked knew what St. Maarten's Day was celebrating (independence? just a holiday because our island is great? the day Columbus discovered the island? - that last one turns out to be true, but not why the holiday exists) and I thought it was interesting when I looked it up. St. Maarten was an actual person - Martin of Tours (Tours is a city in France, and therefore probably not pronounced how I'm saying it). Anyway, Columbus saw this island on November 11, 1493 (although he never actually landed on it - he really just saw it and claimed it for Spain) and since it was St. Martin's Day (yeah, the holiday already existed in 1493), he named the island St. Martin. And it stuck, even though the Spanish didn't colonize it until after the Dutch and French did. The Dutch spell Martin differently, hence, Sint Maarten.

Anyways, the government forced all retail businesses to close, which they didn't tell us until yesterday at 4:48pm. I was planning on working all day because we had five ships in town. It was supposed to be a very busy day and it was the main reason I flew down this week as opposed to later in the month. But this was what our store looked like today:

The cops drove down Front Street every 5 to 10 minutes to make sure every store stayed closed. They even shut down a lady selling handmade crafts from a table in an alley! I was very frustrated that we couldn't open, but there was definitely nothing I could do about it. So I went on an adventure.