If Only The World Was My Oyster..

If the world was my oyster, then I certainly would be travelling far more than I do now but with airline tickets reaching the stratosphere and my budget shrinking with the start of university, I enjoyed my week in Turkey as much as I possibly could.

I travelled with a local youth group, hence my ability to afford the trip and funnily enough after weeks of desperate seeking, people finally began to confirm their places on the trip till suddenly our budget was looking like it would be unable to contain them all. Thankfully, the extra people were shoehorned into the budget after the cost had risen and luxuries such as paid dinner were removed.

Plenty of legroom!

The most amazing thing to happen before I took off was that my dad handed me spending money! Now whilst this may be a regular occurrence for some, for me it is an extremely rare event given the fact that as my parents put it; ‘you’re a working man.’

When we landed in Istanbul after an amazingly comfortable flight -seriously Turkish airlines is amazing- we were hit by the blast of heat which we had never experienced even in the summer back home. It was humid but we endured as we quickly marched downstairs to the Subway and walked the long hall, dragging our suitcases behind us, imagining we were off to Hogwarts. Well actually, we weren’t thinking that given the extreme oh so mature nature of our group of course.

Harry Potter and his broomstick would have come in handy though because as we neared the Subway entrance, the shutter was down! We had literally missed the last train by two minutes. We were stranded at 12am in the airport and as we climbed the stairs once again, we saw people who had simply decided spending the night sleeping on the bench was a far better option.

If there was one part that was not asleep, it was the taxi line outside the airport and as our youth group leader haggled for the price that would least rip us off, we stood around hoping that we could get to our hotel as soon as possible. We were sixteen people so we were fearing that any transport would turn out to be a giant rustbucket but blissfully, we were provided with two lovely air-conditioned Mercedes people carriers.

Onwards we excitedly drove to our hotel, how was it going to be?