Long Days on the International Road

I feel the need to remind the readers of this blog that every day of international travel does not consist of sightseeing and traversing fascinating and unique places around the world. Wednesday was a case in point. Here is a brief outline of the day, which involved getting from Tashkent to Baku, Azerbaijan and the timeline is from 2:45am until 9:00pm from hotel doorstep to doorstep.

2:45am - woke up after 3-4 hours of sleep after dinner the evening before
3:30am - departed the hotel in Tashkent under the dark of night to the airport
4:30-5:55am - hang out at the surprisingly busy Tashkent airport with very little to do or see; many attempts to get rid of thousands of Uzbek sum to no avail; selected for special security check because the airport police appeared to want to demonstrate their worthwhile
5:55am - depart on one of the oldest airplane interiors in Turkish Airlines fleet; my knees touched the seat in front of me for the duration of the 5 hour flight
< sleep, eat breakfast, sleep, attempt to get water from a very rude Turkish flight attendant who acted like the last thing she wanted to do was serve people flying from Uzbekistan >
9:15am - arrive in Istanbul after already being *up* for ~8 hours
10:00am - begin 4-5 hour layover in the Istanbul airport
< the layover consisted of finding a restaurant with free wifi and four of us - Alex, Travis, Eliana, and me - camped out for the entire time and had some breakfast/lunch and checked e-mail (cough Facebook and Twitter a little bit) the entire time, we were very productive >
2:20pm - boarded a Turkish Airlines flight bound for Baku, Azerbaijan (2.5 hour flight back east)
< a little more sleep, the in-flight movie was Gulliver's Travels starting Jack Black, so I was glad I did not take headphones >
7:00pm - arrive in Baku, it is much, much colder, board a bus for the hotel in the city center
9:00pm - arrive at the Park Inn Baku right on the Caspian Sea shore in central Baku

So, that was Wednesday. It was a productive day in terms of getting caught up on work e-mail, and definitely a day of experiencing Turkish Airlines airplane cabins. I always feel the need to share some of the reality surrounding these international trips to help everyone understand what all of our days are like. There are no pictures of this day because nothing was really photo worthy. It wasn't a bad day, we had fun hanging out in the airports, we are usually sitting near one another on the planes and that makes for some great conversations and laughs, but no sightseeing on Wednesday.

Up next will be a much more fun blog post all about Baku, an amazing city with some great districts and some amazingly funny hosts.