After visiting the cistern, the jet lag started to catch up to us. We walked back to our apartment & took a 30 minute nap, then we watched church over zoom so we could still feel like part of our own congregation even though we were halfway across the world. Then we ventured out for dinner. We stopped at a restaurant that had a balcony overlooking both the Hagia Sophia & the Blue Mosque & took some pictures, but they were pretty busy & expensive so we decided to keep looking for another restaurant. We found a cute little Turkish café along the street near our apartment & decided to have an authentic Turkish dinner there. We got some delicious garlic mushrooms with melted cheese & naan with yogurt/mint dip for appetizers, then got the clay pot dinner for 2. (The clay pot dinners originate in Cappadocia, Turkey which was one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited. Trek didn’t go to Cappadocia so I wanted him to experience a clay pot dinner). Basically, they fill a clay pot with a chicken stew with chicken, seasonings, & vegetables, then cook it for a long period of time buried in the ground in this clay pot. They set the whole thing on fire, then tap the pot until the lid flies off, & then pour it out in a giant bowl on your table. You serve the stew over rice & mashed potatoes. It was delicious.
After dinner, we walked back to the blue mosque for some night pictures. We sat on the steps & listened to the night prayer, then went back to our apartment to check in for our flight to Mongolia the next day.
Only then did we start to realize that our tickets to Mongolia didn’t look right. The confirmation email we received had all the info on it, but when we logged into the Mongolian Airlines website, it said that our reservation didn’t exist. We tried calling the phone number for Mongolia Airlines & every time we called we’d receive a message saying “all operators are busy, please call back later.” Then it would hang up on us. After trying to call 10+ times, we started to panic. We looked up the flight & there was NO FLIGHTS to Mongolia on Mongolian Airlines for Monday, March 11th. At this point it was 10:30 at night & we were scared out of our minds that we were stuck in Turkey & wouldn’t be able to fly into Mongolia to pick up Cadence. It was an awful feeling. We did some research & saw that Turkish Airlines had a flight to Mongolia at the same time our Mongolian Airlines flight was so we got hopeful that maybe it was a Turkish Airlines flight that we purchased through Mongolian Airlines. We called Turkish airlines & they couldn’t see us on the flight, so we panicked even more. At midnight we decided that the best thing to do was go to the airport & talk to Mongolian Airlines or Turkish Airlines & figure out what was going on. Let’s just say it was a VERY sleepless night.
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