Day Zero- off!

7.45am flight. Aim to reach by 5.45. Sleep at 3 (don’t even ask!), wake at 5am. Bathe. Tingle. Re-check bags, all the important stuff. Am quite an under-confident traveller. Actually, I don’t know because I am a non existent traveller. Only my third ‘international’ trip, including my move to this place- D’s fifth, maybe. Call the cab company (we have never called in a cab till now in Singapore)- after making D hold for 5 minutes they happily say they don’t have a cab to send. Er, ok. Call the next, get a cab. Its there in, like, two minutes. It’s a gleaming white Mercedes. Beat that! (there’s a long story about taxis and merc taxis that I have been planning to write for a while, but haven’t. Basically flagging down a Merc Taxi costs the same as any other, but we have always just missed them- by few seconds, or by one place in the queue- repeatedly).
So here we finally are, being driven in style to the airport, thinking if this is not a sign then what is? What a start to the day, the trip, the nerves.

Singapore’s Changi Airport is a delight. It is huge, sprawling and extremely efficient (from whatever we have seen of it), with hundreds of shops, cafes and a few bars. There’s so much space I can’t imagine it ever feeling crowded. We’re through everything in no time at all, and change some old Traveller’s Cheques (USD) and our Sing dollars into Euros. Aren’t planning on using my newly acquired debit card there, so it’s the whole budget in Euros- hard cash(gulp)! Lazily making our way to Gate no. C23, we pause- ridiculously- at the free Internet stations. Who would have mailed us in those few hours? That’s right, no one. In the Boarding Lounge we start scribbling our little journals.

Board Flight QR 639 at 7.15 or so. The flight leaves at 9.30. Close to two hours late. Welcome to Qatar Airways, we think. I proceed to watch Batman Begins (again) while D sees Mr&Mrs. Smith, which she can’t describe as ‘crap’ enough, followed by Bollywood’s Page Three. Then we both synchronise and watch the absurdly interesting The Jacket, only for time to run out with us about twenty minutes from the end.
Only a few hours into the 8 hour flight does it strike us that reaching late for a 1.5 hour stopover at Doha means we’re going to be almost half an hour late for the connecting flight to Istanbul. We look, understandably, to an air hostess for reassurance.
Us: “excuse me, we have a connecting flight to Istanbul that leaves at 12noon (Doha time). Looks like we’re going to be late but they’ll hold the flight, right?”
Her: “I don’t really know, sir. There’s a large group going to Cairo I know, but I don’t know about Istanbul. If there aren’t too many people….”
Us: “but…they…can’t…I mean…aren’t there others..but…”
Her: “If you reach the flight only 15-20 mins late it should be ok, but I am not sure they will hold it beyond that.”
Thanks, honey. It is 12 noon right now, we are still in the air and the flight is supposed to have left a couple of minutes ago. Your ignorance is real comforting.

As it was, we are part of about half the rest of the passengers who were running out of the plane for connecting flights they are late for, or getting late for. We’d tried to decipher one of the languages we heard, suspecting it was Turkish- sure enough they were along with us being herded manically to the next plane sans any real check in, boarding passes thrust into our hands.

Soon after (but enough for the flight to leave even later than it was supposed to- an hour in total), the next thing in our hands is the lunch ‘menu’. Chicken, beef or fish? Thanks, but you need to find me a vegetarian meal. It was bloody tasty though, the pasta I got- am not so sure about D’s meat dish. Oh, guess what- no alcohol on Qatar Air. That’s the price of cheap tickets, we think glumly. This flight is cheaper- no personal movie thingies, so all hope of catching the end of The Jacket disappears with the trashy movie that appears on the common screens.

D dozes a little. I look out a little, trying to coordinate the map they keep showing on the screen with which part we are flying over now. Cappadocia, maybe? Closer the Black Sea, probably. I nod off and wake to see Istanbul is 200-odd km away. Those whiz by, quite literally, in a plane. I nudge D awake, and I’m gland I’ve got the lucky end of the draw- the window seat on the second half of the flight. We peer through the sunlight and see water far below. Little toy ships- is this the Marmara or the Bosphorus? Then tiny matchboxes come into view, with- are those minarets? I don’t know, but I see the runway, and with that bump come smiles.

We have touched down in Istanbul, Turkey.