Lawson's journal for his trip to Turkey Day 1

Hello. This is my daily journal of my trip to Turkey. Here you go:

Day 1: Baba (dad) woke us up at 4:18 this morning. I was thrilled to go on the first trip of 2012; I jumped out of bed and got ready in a flash. The plan was to leave the house at 4:45 and get to a ma’s house at 5:00 so that she could drive the car back from the airport but we ended up leaving the house at a little after 5.

            When we arrived at the Delta door entrance to the airport, I was so excited to go on a plane again. We got in and had a self check-in. The computer asked if we wanted to volunteer our seat if the plane was too full from Seattle to New York, Baba said yes and (it was on a bidding system) they asked how much money would that cost them. Having previous knowledge, he said 900 per seat; the maximum was 400 so we didn’t volunteer. The next question asked if we wanted to give up our seat for the flight from New York to Turkey. He didn’t read it clearly and rejected. I was like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THAT’S A FRICKEN 10 HOUR FLIGHT.” (you could get bumped up to first/business class if you stand-by) Baba said that we’d just go to the desk to change that, so he went and the “Deltans” said they didn’t need any stand-by’s. I guess that kind of made me feel better because if they did need stand-by’s and my dad rejected, I would’ve been so disappointed. We arrived at New York and went straight for the Sky Club. We got in because we were flying Delta and Baba had a Platinum Amex card. I tried Nutella there for the first time and it was soo good. They also had really good biscuits. Afterwards, I thought I might as well get a Snapple since we were in New York and both my brother and I were given 40 bucks to spend for the trip from our parents. When we arrived at the gate, I immediately ran to the food court to get a Snapple. Everything changed when I saw the price, $3.89 for a (I think it’s) 16-ounce bottle. I expected it to be no more than $2.50 so I left New York without a Snapple L. I peed at least 10 times on the flight, IDK why. The plane ride felt like FOREVER! The main reason was that there was no personal TV. This made the ride feel longer because we couldn’t watch movies (except from the shared TV’s). I was afraid to use my phone too much because I didn’t want it to use up all of my batteries. The funny thing was on our flight from Seattle to New York, there was a TV for everyone (737, 5 hours) but from New York to Turkey, a 10-11 hour flight, there was no TV. WTF!

            I started needing to go pee AGAIN, 20 minutes before we landed and because we were landing, the crew didn’t let me go. I went at the airport and it was so good. J We first had to get a “visa”. It was basically a $20 sticker. So what you do is you wait in line, you pay them 20 bucks and they put a sticker in your passport. After that, we had to wait in line to cross the border. There were at least 200 people in front of us. While we were waiting, my dad said something about the Bible and I told him to shut up because it was Turkey, a Muslim country, you don’t know what they’d do to you. We finally got to the crossing place and we expected another 20 minute wait there because we weren’t in the US so there were no orderly lines. Everyone just bunches up together behind a red line and the guy that gets people through the border picks the good-looking people to let them cross. If you’re like me, there’s no chance. Baba was smart and he took us to the farthest lane and OMG, it looked like Heaven vs Hell. The line was not perfect, but for there, it was… surreal. In that line, we met this guy that was digging for the ark, Noah’s Ark. It was pretty cool but we also saw something that was the opposite of cool. There was this lady that just cut the whole line and walked right through the border-like thing. The guy didn’t even give a crap. My dad was kind of making a big fuss out of it so I told him to shut up before we get involved, it’s Turkey, you don’t know what they’d do to you. We got into Turkey in less than 10 minutes. My mom, a picture freak, wanted to take some pictures of the ads on the wall with Turkish words so that when she posts up the pictures on Facebook, people wouldn’t have a problem knowing that we were in Turkey. We checked in our luggage’s to we had to go to the Baggage Claim to get our stuff. We found all our stuff and my dad said in a loud voice, “Praise the Lord!” I’m like, WTF, we’re in a Muslim country! We also had to speak Chinese because Middle Eastern, especially the al-Qaeda people hate Americans and we didn’t want to take that chance. J Soon, we went to get a taxi. We wanted a biggest van because there were four of us but some dude “forced” us into a smaller cab. The driver wasn’t very confident in knowing where our hotel was but I believed in him while my parents doubted him and complained like, “This old man is so bad, he needs to call the hotel.” In the end, he brought us to our hotel without any issues. We were suppose to take a two hour power nap but we were all so beat up, we ended up take a four hour nap. After we woke up, we walked to the big streets where everyone hangs out. It was kind of disappointing because we only saw like 2 Asian people and Turkey is suppose to be the mixing pot of the world (meaning there is every kind of person there). We saw this Iraqi with his friend and they, for some reason, wanted to take a picture with our family. I found that a bit strange but also cool at the same time. I had this, so called ice-cream, it was like Benihanna but instead of food, it was ice cream, super fun. We saw people renting these smoking machines that had liquid on the bottom, they’d just suck through a tube and breathed the  vapor/poison gas into their lungs. I’d say 89 percent of the adults in Turkey smoke. Baba replaced his back iPhone cover into a BMW cover because his outer lens was all scratched, which create glare for the pictures, quite lame. We discovered that everything tastes plain and Bland. Not like our Asian Food. We had a Turkish dinner. I had a “steak”, not really but it was like…tasteless, no salt, no nothing. We rushed back to the Hotel after dinner to swim but it was already closed (closed at 10 PM) when we got back. We weren’t tired so we went to a street-side café to “chill”. It was indeed chilly. J I had to peed really bad again and there were no restrooms there so I ran back to the hotel to pee. Later that night, when I was playing with the safe, I accidently locked our passports and some money in there. The mechanic came and worked on it for about 15 minutes before he fixed it. Then I started writing about the first day of my trip until now. All done, that’s the first day for you.