Sophie À La Carte!

On my last morning in Istanbul, my host drove me to the metro station, and I rode the packed train to the main bus station. I had instructions from the farm to go to a certain agency, buy my ticket, and once on the bus ask the driver to drop me off at a gas station before their last stop. This I did with little difficulty, and once at the gas station a Turkish volunteer, Serdar, picked me up to take me to the farm. Before I go any further, I’d like to address one of my favorite parts of Turkish culture: tea. After I bought my ticket at the bus station, the man at the counter suggested I go upstairs for a cup of caj (pronounced like chai). Cai is prevalent everywhere in Istanbul: people drink caj at the sidewalk cafes, boys deliver trays of caj to the men manning their booths at the bazaar or the farmers market, and a man hawks caj to ferry passengers as they cross the Bosphorus Bay. There’s really only one type of tea served: strong, black, and usually doctored with several spoons...

How's that for click bait? It's amazing how long ago-made, concrete plans change in such a short time. My original plan after trekking through the Western Balkans was to take the train to Istanbul from Belgrade. Using my Eurail pass I purchased before I left in June, I would take a night train to Sofia, spend a few nights there and explore the city, then take another night train to Istanbul, arriving at 8am on Sunday. I would then have a few days in the city before busing out to Buyukcavuslu (trying saying that three times fast, or at all) to start my Workaway experience on the dairy farm. Typical of me, I had this all planned out in advance. Sometimes typical of me, I waited until the last minute to do something- that would be activating my rail pass. I went on the last day I could activate it, which would give me two months to use the pass (5 days of travel). I figured it would be better to activate it as late as possible, since I did not have a plan to use all five days...

A month is not enough time to visit the Western Balkans, by my travel companion Michael and I worked our way through 14 cities in 7 countries in 25 days. It was a marathon journey- we saw a lot, ate a lot, and met a lot of cool people. Looking back a few days after it ended it amazes me how much ground we covered. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my last post, the first casualty of the trip was my Chromebook- I think I accidentally stepped on it and cracked the screen, which left it unusable until I got it repaired. I took it to several repair shops in Albania, but none had the screen I needed. After a lengthy email conversation with an eBay electronics seller and several visits to a computer shop in Prizren, Kosovo, I ordered the correct screen to have shipped from the UK to Ivan, my former CS host in Serbia, fingers crossed that it would arrive before I got there a week and a half later. A few hours later, on the bus to Pristina, Kosovo's capital, I realized I left the bag w...