I'm glad I made it safely here, because I wasn't so sure about that when I was in the plane from Istanbul to Tbilisi. But let's start from the beginning!
An early morning sun shone bright and happy when I woke up last thursday and excitement started to surface when I thought about travelling to Georgia.
The past days in the Netherlands were fine, but I was already there way too long. I was so ready to get out again and get rid of my itchy feet.
My mom and Eric were awesome to drop me off at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.
Once there we said our goodbyes and off I went to the gates, ready for a new adventure!
The first flight was from Amsterdam to Istanbul and all the time I was hoping there wouldn't be some kind of terrorist attack at the airport or a Russian/Turkish pilot mistaking the airplane for an ISIS war mothership and shoot it out of the air.
We landed in Istanbul and I had a 5 hour stopover. I decided to stay in the airport, because I needed to be present 2 hours before my connecting flight anyway and all the hassle with immigration services was not something I looked forward to. Especially when I saw how long the queue was.
But ofcourse I was dying for a cigarette, so I started my quest and went on an adventure to find the smoking area's. Which was actually quite an adventure on itself, since there were no signs anywhere telling you where to find smokers Heaven. So I just followed the signs that said terrace, hoping it would bring me to an actual terrace where one can satisfy there smoky needs. Turns out, it was!
While smoking I kept an eye out on the electronic board to see which gate number my flight had. I waited, and waited and waited some more. Still nothing. All the flights on the board, including flights later on in the night than mine, all had gate numbers, except mine.
When it was time to board (according to my ticket), still no number. I started asking several people and employees walking around, information point, but nobody was able to help me. And they were also not friendly at all, so in the end I just felt like; well, fuck you!
Then I noticed a guy who was on the same flight as me from Amsterdam to Istanbul, frantically looking at the board and something in his face told me that he was on the same plane as me.
So I asked and indeed, he's flying to Tbilisi as well. We decided to stick together after we learned that we both stayed in the same area in Tbilisi, so we could share a taxi. (And me not getting ripped off for being a foreigner.) He is from Georgia and was in Amsterdam for holidays.
Still no known gate number and growing frustrations by the second, I needed my cigarette break again and Lasha joined me, apparantly he was a smoker too!
Just as we wanted to enter our smoking Heaven, the gate number popped up on the screen. Finally!
So we quickly poisoned our lungs and went to the gate.
Another miracle happened, because we took off earlier than the announced time, yay for GlobalAtlas!
One and a half hours later we could see the lights of Tbilisi starting to appear and the pilot told everyone to take their seat and fasten their seatbelt. And that's when it happened and what made me think I might not get out alive.
I've experienced quite some turbulence in all my years of flying, including moderate turbulence. After having experienced moderate turbulence once which made the aircraft already shake and fall like crazy, but this one was horrible! The whole flight no turbulence and suddenly from one second to the other, the plane seemed to drop out of the sky. It literally just fell and started to shake as you would when trying to get sand out of your shoe. If I wouldn't have had my seatbelt fastened, I would have hit the ceiling. The seat just dropped from underneat me and I was hovering for a second. People started to scream and even the flight attendents had a look of pure terror on their faces. Everyone clutched their seats and did their prayers. The next couple of second the airplane kept shaking as if a massive 9.0 earthquake hit us. The flight attendents started banging on the pilots door, which ofcourse didn't help in calming people down. Finally we had a few moments of silence and then it started again. I was so happy when we were finally close to the ground and the turbulence stopped. That was quite a scary moment, I swore to myself never to fly anymore hehe.
Anyway, we landed and everything turned out to be okay. A lot of people started clapping, mostly to get rid of their nerves I think.
Lasha and I went to the luggage claim together and we waited for my bag to arrive. Lasha didn't have a bag, but he didn't mind going with me to fetch mine. The sweetheart even refused to let me carry it after we couldn't find a trolly. I needed to get a simcard as well and Lasha needed one too, so we went to the counter together to get one. Lasha did everything for me, I didn't have to do anything, nor pay anything. I was completely flabbergasted. So, we got our sims and we took a taxi together towards Tbilisi. Ani, my landlord/host, was already awake to let me into the appartment I'm renting.
I heared that people drive like wildlings in Georgia and I thought I've seen quite some wild and dangerous traffic in all my travels, but this was insane. Let's just say that I was glad it was in the middle of the night with hardly any traffic around, otherwise I would have had my second near death experience in just 1 hour time. We arrived 15 minutes later and me and Lasha exchanged our numbers and again he refused to let me pay for the taxi. I made a mental note to myself, to invite him for lunch sometime this week to thank him for everything he has done for me.
We said our goodbyes and Ani was already waiting in the door to let me in. She quickly showed me the appartment and then both of us went to bed since it was already starting to get close to early morning.
Today I woke up pretty late and didn't do anything besides some grocery shopping. Tonight I will work all night and tomorrow I'm meeting up with a traveller to go for a hike in the park behind my house. Check out the "mountain" en turtle lake.
So that was it for now, more coming soon with pictures as well! Cheers!
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