The beds in our hotel room were exceptionally small. Slightly wider than a twin bed, but not even so wide as a double bed. Regardless, we started the night in one bed. To add to the challenge, I stacked all but one pillow up to make a tower so that I could sleep mostly sitting up. As I've mentioned, the cold/flu was finally catching up to me.
Halfway through the night, I woke up with my left ear and left sinuses throbbing. I'd turned onto that side in my sleep, as I tend to do. I was also extremely warm, so I abandoned the bed I was sharing with Craig and settled into the other one. Once again, I made a tower of pillows. But this time, I curled up more on my right side, hoping to reduce the pressure on my left side. As you might expect, when I woke up it was my right side that was hurting.
We showered and dressed to get breakfast. At some point in this process, I thought I might try to pop my ears to ease the pressure in them. This did not go as planned. My right ear popped and made another sound I've not heard before. Instead of relief from the pressure, I got a stabbing pain so great that I curled up on the bed and sobbed for a few minutes. After a few minutes, it eased enough that I was able to get up and get ready for the day.
After a buffet breakfast, we went out to visit the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia Museum. We also visited a shopping street, where we hid under awning to avoid the sudden rain. I'll post Craig's account of our adventures after this post.
By the end of our time out, I was dragging. Jet-lag combined with the sinus issues in the most unpleasant way. To make things more interesting, my right ear was still hurting and, at some point during the day, had started leaking a clear fluid. I was not looking forward to the flight that night, but there wasn't much of a choice.
We got back to the hotel for a late lunch. There we were offered the remnants of the breakfast buffet as a "special treat" or the same menu we'd had the night before. Craig got the chicken again, but with a different soup. I had some soup and a few bites from the buffet. By this point, I was feeling so unwell that I nearly went back to the room while Craig was still eating.
When we returned to the room, I spent the afternoon alternating between hot steamy showers and soaking in the tub. The steam and heat cleared my congestion a bit and made me feel like I might survive the rest of the trip. Craig sat by the window and tried to stay awake. If nothing else, this day in Istanbul did help us adjust to the time.
Our check out was set three hours before our flight. We decided to check out four hours earlier and head to the airport, given our struggles navigating the airport the night before. In the lobby, we waited for a bit with some others waiting for the shuttle before we decided to simply take a taxi.
At the Istanbul airport, we had to pass through two different security checks. At the first, we were able to leave everything in our bags, but once through the scanner they wanted us to open and turn on all our laptops. My game laptop was not happy with this - it's a Windows machine that had been shut down completely for our travels. It's also enormous, as I've mentioned previously, so they were not inclined to let us go through until I got it powered up.
After some wandering through the ticketing area, we found a second security that was more like what we expected. We took everything out of our bags, but we didn't have to turn anything on. We made our way back to the lounge, which was the one thing we were able to easily find in this airport.
There, we sampled a wide variety of foods. Finding nothing to our liking, we abandoned our table so it wouldn't be obvious how many different things we had tried and rejected. We ultimately wound up on a couple of sofas. At some point, I could no longer stay awake and fell asleep on the sofa. Craig also fell asleep, so it's only luck that we woke up in time for our flight.
I was very disoriented from falling asleep like that. Normally, I cannot sleep in open, public places. And it certainly wasn't a comfortable position that I'd found. We made our way through the airport to our gate. I blame the wayfinding for how long it took us to get there, though we were hitting a point in our travels that some of the fault might have been ours.
At the gate, we encountered a new variety of disorganized boarding. Without any announcement, you were somehow supposed to know that you needed to get your passport checked and your boarding pass marked. The line for this was basically the same as the people standing around the gate waiting for a plane. I'm not even sure how we ended up in this line, as there was certainly no reason for us to be there.
After a long wait, we saw a bus pull up outside our "gate". The bus driver was having a real struggle, to judge by the number of times the bus moved forward and back, repositioning itself alongside the curb. Only then did the staff announce that they needed to check passports, if you hadn't done so already. Because there was no space for a line, with everyone waiting, the employees started making their way through the passengers to check passports. But for some reason, they didn't take the stamp with them, so they would check the passport and take the boarding pass back to the desk to stamp it before returning it to the passenger. We watched all of this with some bemusement.
Eventually, we got on the bus and made our way to the plane. On this flight, I decided to watch a movie. I watched "Only the Brave" - it was really good, but I cried most of the way through it. Craig was also watching it, but he had started on an earlier flight so he was a bit ahead of me.
I had been very worried about taking off, because of the issues I was having with my ear. But that wasn't the bad part of this flight. If anything, my ear improved slightly when we got in the air. But landing. Landing was very, very bad. I couldn't do anything that helped my right ear. It became so painful that I was basically just curled up in my seat sobbing. So that was super fun.
Once we got on the ground, the pain leveled off to a somewhat tolerable level. We passed through passport control with only a little confusion. The new electronic system wouldn't let me through so I had to go through another line and find Craig on the other side. We think it's because I haven't been to the UAE since they switched to this system.
Passport control dumped us directly into the baggage claim. We waited a bit, but all four of our bags made the transfer from Istanbul. With our five bags, we made our way to the car rental desk. Craig had rented a car for this trip. The first car we were offered smelled like someone had smoked in it, with an air freshener over the smoke smell. Craig just wanted them to note this, so we weren't charged for smoking in the car. Neither of us smoke, so that would have been very frustrating. Instead, we ended up with a different car. This meant removing all our bags from our first car and putting them into a second.
At this point, it was nearly 2 am, local time. Istanbul is only an hour different, so we had been awake for 18 hours or so. We navigated out of the airport and into Abu Dhabi. We arrived at our hotel location to find, well, an empty lot near a mall. Craig called the airport and we discovered we were not even close to where we were supposed to be.
For whatever reason, the hotel told us to put the Al Wahda Mall in our GPS. The receptionist even spelled the name of the mall for us. A short time later, we found the mall but the hotel was not in evidence. After a bit of driving about - thankfully, the streets were deserted at this time of night so there was no one to mind that we were changing lanes erratically and making turns at random - I spotted the Marriott logo way up on the top of a building. Craig couldn't see it from his seat, but he trusted me and we made our way there. Thankfully, it was the right building. The building sits catty-corner from the Al Wahda Mall.
We had a slight adventure finding the entrance because we are staying in a serviced apartment at the hotel, which has a different entrance that wasn't open that late at night. We had to check in at the hotel and make our way back to the apartment. But I was very relieved to get into our apartment and crash for a few hours.
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