Istanbul, Turkey – 08/27

(Michelle) So we get to the U.S. embassy shortly after it opens. There are tons of people waiting in line there, but it turns out that there is a different line for U.S. passport holders than for everyone else and nobody waiting is a U.S. citizen. We tell them that we were sent here to get some sort of paper from them that we need to get a Chinese visa. We were shocked to realize that the “paper” is just a notarized statement that we are who our passport says we are. It is not like the guy here looks us up in a computer or anything, we literally hand him our passport put our right hand up and state that we are who we say we are, he then stamps a piece of paper and we pay $30 each. What a load of crap. If I am the kind of person who would use a fake passport, this process is not going to deter me from using it, so it is really just a way for the local US embassy to make $30 for no reason. This is something special for getting visas in Istanbul I think. I doubt we will see this anywhere else.
We then head back up to the Chinese embassy where we are promptly rejected at the door. Even though I had phoned them before and they just said come to the embassy, they now say they do not take applications themselves and that we must use a visa service agency. They gave us the business card of a company they recommend. That company happens to be in the Taksim area, so we head back down there and by mid-afternoon we have given them $120 U.S. each (still a lot cheaper than that Chinese Travel Agency at least), our passports, the notarized statement, a passport sized photo and a printout of a bank statement where we had x’d out the account numbers (China requires proof of sufficient funds to get into their country). We will have our visas and passports back by Friday.
Now that we know this timeline, we can finally book a ticket to get to Russia. This turned out to be the easiest thing to do by far. I had been looking up prices for flights online earlier, so I knew roughly what we would be expected to pay. After we left the visa service company, we happened to walk by an office for a Russian Airline and decided as a long shot to just walk in and ask what their price was. It turned out to be ¾ of the price of what we were seeing online and she could reserve the price for us for a Sunday night departure without us paying for the ticket until Friday afternoon when we were sure we had our passports back. Why can’t everything be this easy?? J
That night we met up with the first person we have contacted through couchsurfing.com – Digdem. She met us for a drink at a bar in Taksim (In Chicago terms, Taksim would sort of be like the Lincoln Park area of Istanbul). We had such a great time with her: she is our age, very intelligent and hard working, but very open and friendly at the same time. We talked about life in Istanbul, religion, politics (their presidential elections were the next day) and family. I am sad that we could not spend more time together, but you never know when you will see someone again!

(TJ) This was fun I start the day on about 45 minutes of sleep since we need to head out at the crack of dawn to beat traffic to head up to the US consulate. The US consulate here looks like a castle on a hill; no one is doing any damage to this building with out a full scale assault. That being said it was a pleasant surprise once we got inside to see they actually had a queuing system that worked and chairs for people to sit on while they waited like civilized people. Most other countries have not figured this out at their embassies and consulates and it’s more of a pushing, shoving and cutting game for lines. The even better surprise was that we did not have to wait in line at all since we were U.S. passport holders, this good feeling did not last however as we had to hand over $30 to get a piece of paper that says I am who I am. This was a battle getting all of this paper work together for this Chinese visa but it was the only way. It was almost as big of a battle as convincing Michelle that the Chinese government did not need to know our account numbers for our checking accounts and we could just XXX the stuff out. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t learned anything from her hero, Jack Bauer, the Chinese are not to be trusted.

It was fun going out in Taksim with our new couch surfing friend Didgem. Taksim however is nothing like Lincoln Park, its more like Times Square in New York where there are so many people out and about at night it can be difficult to walk. Despite difficulty walking through the crowds, I really liked the area, tons of shopping, restaurants and some interesting architecture and people watching.

(Michelle) TJ is right, it is not like Lincoln Park visually, but I was comparing it to that as a place to “go out” where there are long stretches (Lincoln Ave.) of bars that you can go to all sort of clumped together. There are nowhere close to the number of people walking around Lincoln Park as there are in Taksim.