Turkey: Where East Meets West

So, I'm heading home tomorrow and I have yet to tell about my past week spent in Turkey. When we arrived in Prague Sunday morning, Ana and I literally had 24 hours before we needed to leave for Istanbul. We went to the apartment and slept, and all of us kind of just relaxed. This was the last time I'd see Ekta and Tete, so we were planning to go out on Sunday night, for one last hoorah, but we didn't even make it for a drink! Ana and I had some rearranging to do luggage wise, whereas Tete and Ekta had a few days to pack. We ended up going to sleep relatively early and on Monday morning, Ana and I woke up around 8 AM to head to the airport. Now, remember how I always have the most outrageous things happen to me when I'm travelling? This is certainly a first.

Ana and I woke up at 8 AM, showered, packed, and were ready to go by 8:30 AM. Our flight left at 11:35 AM, so we were giving ourselves plenty of time to reach the airport. We were saying our finals goodbyes to Tete and Ekta, wishing them the best and telling them that we'd see them soon. As we were saying our goodbyes, Ana begins to leave the apartment and opens the door. Well, the only problem was that the door was locked. Yes, that's right, the door was locked. Now, I'm saying goodbye to Tete, and I hear Ana say from the other room, "Oh My God! The door is locked!" This moment seems to last forever in my head, because I knew right away, we were really screwed.

I 100% knew that there was no way to unlock the door without the key. Now, here's why we didn't have a key. Somewhere in Krakow and Berlin, Ana, and her hoards of clothes, souvenirs, and personal items, seems to have misplaced the key to the apartment. Well how did we get in the apartment you ask? Simply by calling the two people that lived there, Chuey and Elvira (an Argentinian and a Russian). The only problem was, even though Tete, Ekta and Ana have cell phones, only Tete and Ana had credit. After calling the people to let us into the apartment, Tete ran out of credit and only had her Portuguese phone to use. So, anyway, we're locked in the apartment.

I totally blame Ekta for this situation because not only was this her THIRD time being locked in somewhere (AIESEC office, Jenny's house in Roztoky, and now this apartment), her bad luck seemed to have come back to haunt us at the worst of possible times. Ana and I had a flight to catch! In three hours! So we thought, what could we do? Chuey and Elvira were at work, because it was a Monday morning. Someone says that they told one of them not to lock the door on their way out, but I'm not sure they got the message. Either way, I could see how they would naturally lock it because most houses, when you lock the front door, don't lock the people inside. I had a few thoughts jump through my mind, like throwing my suitcase out the window and scuffling down the side of the building like Spiderman, but I knew that Ana wouldn't be able to do follow. Tete's phone was with no credit, Ekta's phone was with no credit, but Ana! Ana had one last phone call to make. So she called Chuey.

It was a desperate attempt to cry for help, but he picked up and we tried our best to explain the situation. Poor Chuey, he was always letting us in when we didn't have a key, but this time he couldn't help. He said he was going to call a few people, because someone was supposed to be dropping off an extra key sometime during the day. Luckily, Ana can receive calls without using credit, so when he called back, he just said that he couldn't get a hold of anyone and we would just have to wait. Great…

By this time, I was just completely frustrated and angry. I was doing nothing to help the situation, because I had no phone and no internet and nothing else, so I laid down in bed and just fell back asleep. I took about an hour nap and woke up to Ana telling everyone that she got a hold of one of the other Brazilian interns and he was doing his best to call everyone and try and get us out of the apartment. Eventually at 10:30 AM (2 hours later) we received word that Lessya was coming to drop the keys off. At this point, we were really confused because Lessya was supposed to be back in Kazakhstan, but we figured it was a different Lessya.

Turns out, around 11:00 AM, Lessya shows up at the front door, and in comes our favorite group leader from Kazakhstan! In all the excitement, Ana and I barely had any time to say hello to Lessya or goodbye to Ekta and Tete and we were out the door within 2 minutes. The fresh air couldn't have seemed more refreshing. I knew we were definitely going to miss our flight, and we arrived at the airport around 11:45 AM. Knowing that we are broke college students (I guess college grad for me), the airlines charged us a €50 rebooking fee and our flight left at 18:30. Great. Not only did we have to wait 6 hours at the airport, but we had to pay $60 to change our flight, just because someone locked us in, we had no keys out, and Ekta was with us.

We eventually caught our next flight, arrived in Turkey around 10 PM and began our next journey in a whole other world.