New Year Vacations

I have not written in a while...

The explanation to that can be found in the new year´s vacations. We went back to Barcelona for 12 days to celebrate New Year, and it was a great time. We managed to see friends and family, even if we missed people that we didn´t have time to meet in the end, and we had friends from Vilnius around most of the days.

All these things meant that for 12 days we were rather busy. We scheduled our days to the last minute, and we spend most of the time visiting people, meeting people or walking around the city. We did that for 12 days. And we loved seeing all the people that mattered to us.

However, Olia and I are not the most sociable people. So even if we enjoyed it, afterwards we were destroyed. As in completely tired and wanting to do nothing and not leave the house for several days. It hit me specially hard, and I didn´t want to do anything apart from reading, watching series and movies, or playing games.(things that do not require very high mental processes).

We have to say that we were "lucky", and we got a couple of extra days of isolation to rest and recover. When we were going back, our flight with Turkish airlines (a very good company, with big seats, a tv in front of you, and food during the flight) was going to pass through Istanbul, were we had to wait a couple of hours. It seems that during these dates, there was quite a big snow storm in there. We didn´t know, and in Barcelona´s airport they told us that, and that our plane had not left Istanbul yet. There was a 2 hour delay.

Of course, our first thought was that we were screwed, since the other flight was 2 hours after the first landing. However, they told us that the chaos was general, and that the other flight would be also delayed. With this reassurance, we went inside the airport and waited in front of the Gate. The plane arrived as expected, and we were ready to board....but we didn´t. Time passed and passed. Eventually, we boarded the plane, and had to wait a looong time before taking off. When we landed in Istanbul, we spent looots of time in the airport tracks, waiting for a place to stop the plane and get out.

Adding it all up, we were 4 hours late at least, and it was 1:45 am. Our plane to Sochi, even if delayed as well, had already left some minutes before that, and we were, in fact, screwed. Considering that, we went to claim new tickets, since the airline should help us in these situations.

After a big queue with all the people of all the flights that got delayed because of the snow, we were told that next possible flight was in 2 days, but that the airline was giving us a room in a hotel and had paid for our food and transfer. With  no other option, we went to enter the country.

To our surprise, Olia passed without incidents but I was told that I required a Visa, for being Spanish  We tried to go back, but they didn´t want to let Olia, since she was officially inside Turkey now, so they kept her passport. We went to an office 20 meters away, and were told that Visas were all for 90 days. We asked for the price, and it was just 15 euros. We paid, they stamped a little thing in my passport, which took 5 seconds, and the police control was happy to let us pass.  It was quite embarrassing, not a real Visa, just an entrance fee.

Next thing was to recover our luggage. We went to the office of lost luggage, and we were told that it could wait in the airport for 2 days. We needed it back for our stay in the hotel, so we asked them to bring it to us. They said it would take very long, like 2 hours, but we had no choice. It was rather stupid too, since they should have an easy way to keep track of baggage in transit, and in other circumstances they are able to transfer the baggage from plane to plane in less than 20 minutes...but well, airports are terrible disorganized messes everywhere it seems....

After 2 hours waiting, we were able to reach the desk of the airline in the airport that would transfer us to the hotel. They told us, again, that we would have to wait an hours or so until the shuttle arrived. So we waited some more, taking the chance to have some kind of breakfast (after all these queues and waiting  it was after 8 am already). We finally got the shuttle and the transfer to the hotel, we checked in (10 am), and we just went to sleep. We woke up to eat (it was paid by the airline), and continue sleeping, for the whole day and part of the next. We also read, and stayed in bed for a long time. It was quite awesome, actually.

On the second day, after lunch, we decided to actually go and visit something, and we found out that the hotel was right in the centre of the city. We were able to see the blue mosque, and to pick a cache in the process. It was quite nice, even if rather cold. We spent an hour or so walking around, and then went back to the hotel to rest some more and get ready to go to the airport.

We managed to give our suitcases, after having to transfer some weight from one to the other, since we were forced to put duty-free things inside and the total weight had increased. We went to the plane, and this time everything went fine, although the plane took a little longer than planned to take off.

We arrived to Adler, and spent lots of time trying to pass the border and get our suitcases. We didn´t have any problems, but it just took extremely long. Eventually we arrived home, dead, and we went to sleep at 6 am. I had to wake up 2 hours later and go to work, so I did. I had missed 2 extra days of work, but at least it meant that it was Friday. I survived the day, and with that weekend and several days of rest we got used again to live here in Russia.

Now that I have recovered, I´ll write sooner I hope. There´s lots of things that have happened in the world that I´d like to rant about, and I have lots of new computer games that I´d like to comment.

We´ll see....