Day 15

Saturday, August 11

My trip is officially 1/3 over or so :(

5:40am CET - woke up to go to the airport. Checked out around 6am and found out that we had to get the Aerobus at Placa de Catalunya, not Universitat where we had been dropped off. Decided to walk and made the 6:30am bus, which was packed chock full. Then he stopped 2-3 more times and it was even more chock full. But otherwise, no problems to speak of.

7:10am - get to the airport and find the desks to check in but they are not open yet. Get in line and the time ticks away. Finally they open up the two gates for our flight but one of the desks is for business class. Of course, most of us in there were flying coach. Anyway, long annoying story short, the whole check-in process was quite a total pain and there was absolutely no organization. We didn't get checked in until about 8:20am. The line at security was quite long, but moved quite fast. Had no trouble getting through as they had tons of detectors open and it moved quite quickly.

9:50am - finally get in the plane - we are in the LAST row. Don't know how we managed that. After about a half hour of waiting, flight finally left, not sure what the delay was, but perhaps it was because some people were still getting through security due to their shitty check-in? LOL.

12 noon - flight landed about 11:50. By the time we got off the plane and made it to the baggage claim area, the luggage was just about starting to come off. Amanda's bag came in about 30 seconds and mine about 30 seconds after that. Followed the customs line for nothing to declare and that was it in the way of security, again no passport control, and no stamp :( :( :( Found our way to the train station and bought a ticket for 2.80 euros. A train was leaving in about 5 min so we hopped on and got off at Central Station. Had to carry our suitcases up a big flight of stairs to get to the metro but after that it was ok. Bought and validated our metro tickets and got on - except that we got on going in the wrong direction LOL. Oops. I blame Amanda :p Got off at the first stop we hit and went to the other side.

1:00pmish - Made it to the Sainte-Catherine stop and the hotel was practically right there. As expected our room wasn't quite ready, so we left our baggage in this little room and found some lunch. Tons of restaurants in the area of the hotel because it is where the old fish market was, but they are all very expensive. Ended up finding a little convenience/grocery store and bought a pretty decent salad and coke. Also bought a Galler chocolate bar - of course - dark chocolate filled with some kind of coffee cream……Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

2:00pm - walked around the immediate square a bit more and went back to the hotel around 2:30 where we were finally able to check in. I had read all the reviews on TripAdvisor about the Hotel Welcome of course, so I knew that the Istanbul room was one of the "bad ones" that people reviewed poorly a lot, so when I saw her pick up the Istanbul key, I got really nervous… but really the room is fine. It is small and the beds are narrower than they were in Barcelona or Lisbon but the room is no smaller than ours in barcelona. No a/c but it was a high of like 70 or something. There is a big ceiling fan right over the beds which has two speeds - really fast and really really fast - wish it could be turned down but it works so it should be fine. Bathroom is good-sized, not too well-lit but the shower is big enough and there is even a towel-warmer. And of course the room is amazingly decorated, since that's the hotel's whole m.o. (see pictures) So, sure the room appears a little worn here and there but not enough to warrant the kinds of reviews for this room I'd seen on TripAdvisor. But the people working are as nice as everyone says - anything you need they will help with. And when you walk in and out they say friendly hellos.

Anyway, we got settled and stuff and I turn on my cell phone and it's telling me the PIN is blocked. Already I knew it was apparently sending blank text messages to people in the phone book but apparently it also tried (unsuccessfully obviously!) to enter the PIN 3 times and these GSM phones block it out! It's asking for a PUK code and I don't have a clue what that is. It's telling me I have 10 tries to enter it or the phone shuts down for good. YAY!! So I freak out but decide to forget about it for now and we go out to explore the area.

4:00ish pm - walk around the immediate area, go into the lovely St. Catherine church which is totally different from any of the churches we saw in spain and portugal. Kept walking around, looking at menus, etc. Found a really cool shop called Wasko which had a lot of fun wacky things in it.

5:30pm - Pretty much circled the whole area around our hotel and came back to it around or so as we weren't yet ready for dinner. Figured I'd open up my computer to see what happened and to my surprise, I could connect to some random wireless network!! YAY!!! So I got my mom on skype, talked about the phone issue and I was able to find the manual for the phone which said to contact your service provider. So instead of me trying to call from Belgium, I had her call while I was on skype. They gave her the PUK code and I entered my original PIN and it worked. YAY!

6:45ish pm - went back to one of the pizza places we had walked past - it is right on the square facing the front of the church called I Latini. We both had pizza and it wasn't toooooo expensive except for the drinks (my bottle of water was 3.50!). We will definitely find other places for meals outside this immediate area or we will go broke lol!

8:30pm - came back here and found some channels (the tv gets lots of them but mostly in french or flemish) that had english stuff subtitled, so we watched The Birdcage and a couple other things. We were tired from having to get up so early so had an early night. Tomorrow we'll go to the main tourist area of the city, a few minutes' walk away from the hotel.