Weeks 16&17

The one where she visited her almost and wannabe homelands

What I did this week:

• Ran into our Kaizen Kouple Dan and Rachel at the airport. (Total swoon. Love them.) They happened to be on the same flight to Istanbul with us but they were off to the south of Turkey to visit another Kaizen.

• (Ab)used my Priority Pass by obnoxiously checking into all three of the lounges in the Istanbul airport. Honestly, I honestly don’t know how I’ve lived without Priority Pass, and more importantly, I don’t know how my parents managed to travel with us without Priority Pass. Being able to check into a lounge, get free food and drinks and not have to worry about the kids running off to a different terminal when you’re not looking just seems like the no brainer here.

• Got lost on our street trying to find our airbnb. I swear we walked up and down the street three times before we figured out how the number system worked…and that you had to walk around to the back of the house to get in.

Haiiiii Tel Aviv! I love you already!

Cool balconies on the way to our airbnb

• Worked for a bit at the airbnb before venturing to get tacos..in Tel Aviv. Don’t ask me why we went with tacos in Israel but tbh they were REALLY freaking good. Also we ordered WAY too many and I basically rolled myself out of the restaurant.

Pre-rolling myself out of tacos

• Started Saturday with quite possibly the best brunch I’ve ever had (and being a basic NYC #brunchbetch, that’s that’s saying a lot). My scrambled egg sandwich was out of this world and an endive salad too? Lawd have mercy.

JUST LOOK AT IT

• Continued my perfect Saturday with my absolute favorite activity on Earth- plopping my booty down on the beach, making myself a drink, reading my kindle and getting about 16 shades darker. No joke, if beach bumming was a sport, I’d be rocking that Michael Phelps gold metal game. (Which I also apparently was enjoying too much to take photos of.)

• Interrupted my relaxing sand time for a dip in the clear blue bathwater that is the Mediterranean. I’m not joking. It’s SO warm. If I wasn’t already on board, it would have really made me *warm up* to Tel Aviv. Heh heh heh. (forgive me)

• Was pulled away from the beach to go to the biggest acro jam I’ve ever seen-there must have been 100 people there playing. Freaking Candyland. The best part was that there were a lot of more advanced people so we were able to ask questions and FINALLY got our 180 degrees pop from throne to reverse throne. SO pumped.

O____O

• Rushed back to the airbnb at literally the last second to get to our reservation at Imperial. Although you’d never guess from the outside, Imperial was ranked the best bar in the middle east and the 16th best bar in the world (and therefore a need-to-go). #casual

• Ended up going through five rounds of drinks and five plates over four hours and in the process befriended two guys- Jaime and John. Jaime was a local expat who was an absolute firecracker. Five minutes into meeting him I made a comment to Daniel about him DEFINITELY being in sales because damn, dude knew how to entertain. …20 minutes later my intuition was confirmed when he said something about bizdev. All around, excellent night.

This may or may have been taken at the end of the night

Guess which one was mine *evil grin*

• Managed to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn (ok 7am) to catch our tour to the Dead Sea. Because the Dead Sea isn’t a full day activity, we stopped by Masala first.

What’s Masada you ask?

The view from the top- that’s the Dead Sea in the background, and Jordan on the other side of it

Original Roman tiling!

Above the black line is restored, below it is original

There was a floor above these pedestals and they circulated water under it for the hot baths

• Used the magical healing powers of the Dead Sea to cure my hangover (or maybe it was just time…we’ll never know). But wow ok that sea is HELLA salty. I was warned by probably four different people not to shave or get the water anywhere near my face but I shrugged them off, as any good skeptic would. But wow. Daniel got some water near his eye at one point and was literally unable to open his eye for 15 minutes, and when I scraped my leg/back on a rock I was in actual pain from the water on my open wound. 6/10 would do once but not again.

The dead sea was basically an animal trying to kill you with salt, so I decided to counter with this. Didn’t work.

Flags on flags on flags

• When we got back into town that night I consulted my spreadsheet for a classic Israeli restaurant (#plannerlyfe) and we ended up sitting at the bar this realllly good mediterranean restaurant. I got the traditional Israeli seafood dish and Daniel got the butcher’s cut which were both fantastic (though mine was definitely better).

• Continued our tour of Tel Aviv’s incredible nightlife scene by going to SpiceHaus, another top rated cocktail bar. The theme here was ‘drink laboratory’ and all of the bartenders wore lab coats to concoct your (albeit fantastic) drinks.

Our drinks came in bottles..in cups.. which we then poured into glasses. Side note- what an appropriate drink name for this side trip

• Rented bikes on Monday morning and rode along the beach down to the old port city of Jaffa. The windy streets and old world charm reminded me a lot of Europe and the 4000 year old port definitely didn’t hurt that impression.

Looks just like Europe!

This was definitely my favorite of the bunch

There is so much incredible graffiti/street art in Tel Aviv- I may have gotten slightly obsessed with documenting it all

Narrowly managed to avoid the sprinkler to take this photo of the incredible view of downtown Tel Aviv

Also stumbled across this beautiful tree/street art in the old city- there are so many pops of color here, it’s incredible

• Stopped at the beach on the way back for a mid-day dip before starting work. (Talk about living your best life. Not complaining.)

Oh hello!!

• Worked until about 11pm then went to this bar/restaurant where we were seated at a communal table and ended up making friends with the others at our table- two of them were Californians (a semi-professional surfer and his girlfriend) and the rest were locals (who actually knew how to do acro).

• Went to the airport at about 1:30am for our 5:00am flight and honestly it was probably the best decision of the trip. Tel Aviv I love you but WHAT THE HELL.

• As part of the process of leaving the country I was pulled aside and subjected to a FULL 15 minutes of intense questioning (which is a long time when there’s a line of 10 more people behind you). It started innocuously with questions like What is your full name? Where are you going? How long have you been in Israel? and progressed to I see you went to Morocco, tell me your entire itinerary, how you got from city to city, how long you were there, where you stayed, and the names of the nine friends you went with. Oh you were in Turkey as well? Are you Turkish? You have a Turkish last name but you’re not Turkish? How did that happen? No no, go on- tell me the full story. What are your grandparent’s full names? Where were they born? Where do they live now? Do they speak Greek/German/Turkish/English? Oh I’m sorry to hear about your grandpa’s passing. You’re traveling for a year? What are the names of all of the countries you’ve been to and will be going to -in order please- …

• Finally made it fully through security two hours after we started and had approximately 12 minutes in the lounge before having to get on our 5:00am flight full of crying babies to Istanbul.

• Paid zero dollars for our day in Istanbul. Research (aka my best friend) led me to find out that Turkish Airways actually provides day-long completely free guided tours of Istanbul for flyers with long layovers.

• Hopped on a bus into the city with about 40 other travelers and after a traditional Turkish breakfast we started our tour with two obelisks outside of the Blue Mosque. One was brought over from Egypt centuries ago and the other was built by the Turks. Both pretty impressive (but the fact that they weren’t perfectly aligned was sending my OCD into overdrive).

• Continued the tour in the Blue Mosque which was STUNNING. Oh my god. I’ve never seen so much detail and intricacy. All you could do was walk around with your mouth hanging open. There was almost no way to even photograph it either because 1. Of its massive size and 2. Its pockets of interest all over the place.

Like, what?

• Followed up the Blue Mosque with a tour of the Hagia Sophia. Daniel was especially excited to see the Hagia Sophia but after wandering around for awhile, neither of us was nearly as impressed as we were with the Blue Mosque. The interest in the Hagia Sophia really lies more in its size for the time it was built and the history of its occupants. From starting out as an orthodox  church to ending up as a Muslim mosque, the building went through many faith and decor changes (including the plastering over of all of the mosaic detail from the Christians). Next time I’d like to get a personal guide to provide more insight.

One image literally cannot capture it all

• Because we left the group and spent so long wandering the Hagia Sophia, we ended up legitimately getting left behind. Whoopsie. We wandered around for a bit with a vague idea of where the lunch restaurant was but no name and no way to contact our tour group leader or anyone in the group.

• Ended up finding them in the first restaurant we asked. Talk about beginner’s luck.

• Invented a new game called ‘Can I sleep here?’ and spent the rest of the afternoon playing it (to the displeasure of our tour group leader).

• Returned to the Istanbul airport for a wonderfully SHORT security process.

• FINALLY crashed on the flight back to Sofia and slept like a baby well into the next morning.

Sofia greeted us with this be-u-ti-ful sunset

A side note about names/Miscellaneous points that I’m having difficulty tying into this narrative:

• All throughout this area of the world (eastern Europe/the Balkans/Turkey/Greece) I keep getting asked about my last name. And not in the usual ‘wtf is that? How do you pronounce it? It looks like someone slammed their hand down on a keyboard’ way but in the ‘Are you Bulgarian? Turkish? Greek? Your name looks familiar’ way… which is SO COOL.

• As far as first names go, I’ve been surprised to learn that literally no one outside of native English speakers can pronounce Dana. One wouldn’t think it would be that hard (it’s literally four letters. Two of the same) but I’m either Dan-a, Dah-nah or my absolute favorite- Tina. (Blech). It’s gotten so bad that I’ve literally started to introduce myself as Dah-nah. Alas, I’ve had bigger problems in life.