Realm: Various - Subrealm: Things that are annoying

(Wednesday, 12 April)

* Forgetting that it's April, and therefore bringing the wrong (out of date) Studi-ticket up to the Uni, so that when I get kontrolliert, I get fined. (Fortunately, they have a policy that if you show up at the office with a valid one, it's only 5E, instead of 40, but still. dumb.)

* The fact that the bus customer service office is closed on Wednesday afternoons.

* Having your webbrowser spaz when you try to open a composition window in webmail, so that it opens 40 composition windows.

* The fact that completely random people, whom I don't (believe I) know, have me listed as a friend on their LJ's. Possibly the LJ servers hiccuped, but...

* Having the Cisalpina be delayed for an hour, causing Grace to panic that we're going to miss our flight out of Frankfurt to Istanbul. Bloody Italian trains.

* Taking flights that are scheduled to arrive at 2 AM...and then get delayed!

Realm: Touristing – Subrealm: Istanbul I

Background: Some time ago, our fearless adventurers decided to take advantage of several days holiday at the archive and visit Istanbul, where we’d never been but always wanted to go. And hey, vacationing in Turkey is a classic German thing to do!
So yeah, our train was delayed by an hour. Fortunately, we found a friendly train conductor who re-routed us by a direct train to the airport. And as it turned out, our plane was delayed by half an hour anyway!
We got to Istanbul at about 2:30 AM. We were mostly asleep on our feet, but we managed to buy our visas, find an ATM, and get in a taxi, whose driver drove like a bat out of hell into the old city, via the Golden Gate (a roman triumphal arch later incorporated into the 5th century walls), and Kennedy Cadesi, to our hotel in the (extremely touristy) neighborhood of Sultanahmet. The drive would have had wonderful views by day; as it was, we got some idea of the splendor earlier, when our plane circled around Istanbul, seeming at times likely to crash into a dome…
( Thursday )

Update:
The area in front of Aya Sofya is a square (or maybe a road, or a bus parking lot--it's a bit hard to tell), with some Roman remains on one side and a park fronting the famous ( Blue Mosque )