we made our way across town today to go to the syrian visa. bad news. turns out that first of all, if you want to get a visa from there, you have to get there before 11:30 which we didnt. secondly, they said that we have to get a letter of reccomendation from the US embassy in order to get a visa. from what i’ve read on lonely planet, it’s near impossible to get this letter. crap. we tried to locate and call the Us embassy, but unfortunately, both phone numbers that we had for it were no good. we got a cab to go there, but upon arriving it turned out that the Us embassy *used to* be there, but now was located across town. arrrgghh!! anyways, now we have to wait till tomorrow to try and get this letter and hopefully get to the syrian embassy by 11:30. if we succeed, we’ll be able to leave istanbul the following day. we’ll have ended up staying here for 7 days instead of the 3 we initially planned. on the other hand, if we cant get this visa, there is no way for us to get to jordan from here (syria is in the way) and we’ll probably have to end up buying plane tix which are bank. *sigh*.
didnt do too much else today. we ate again at our favorite restaurant. heh, this is the third time we’ve gone there in the last few days, but we just cant resist it!!
*v
I don’t know if you guys are following the news at all but Arafat is near death in some French Military hospital and Israel and the whole middle east is preparing for his death… and the funeral and lots of grieving arabs. The problem it seems is that they want to bury him in Jerusalem but Israel is not going for it, instead they want him buried in the Gaza strip. Don’t know how wise it would be to be an American tourist in the middle east right now. Just a heads up, guys.
yeah, we’ve been watching cnn here in our hotel. it’ll definitely be interesting to see how this turns out… but honestly, i doubt that this will really affect us all that much. if things go totally nuts in israel, we’ll skip it, but i dont think that beng american elsewhere in the middle east will realy matter. i’ve read posts of americans traveling in the ME right when we invaded iraq… when public sentiment was highly against us… and even then, these people said that traveling was completely safe…
Thanks for the heads-up, Lora! We are keeping an eye on things, for sure. Turkey feels very safe. Everyone is much nicer here than they were in Morocco, which I compare because it is a Muslim country. Of course, Turkey is like Middle-East-Lite; Istanbul, at least, is trying very hard to be a European city. We’ll see how things go in Syria, if we ever get there, and Jordan. Jordan, especially, is supposed to be pretty moderate. Isreal might turn out to be a no-go, but it would be really nice to visit. Thing is, people who’ve been there say they feel very safe there — but these same people freak out about other places which are not really so unsafe. It’s just a perception thing based on visiting a place, versus just hearing about it on the news (which only reports the bad stuff).
Anyway, keep yer fingers crossed for us!
Hugs,
Caryn