Welcome Back to İstanbul, Turkey

… But this welcome is to the Istanbul Airport (IST) instead of to the cruise port we were at just a few days ago.

Boarding for TK1850 was delayed considerably. In fact, we got to our seats on the aircraft at what should have been our take off time of 3:40p. No matter. We landed @ IST 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

I take back any negative thoughts that might have gone through my mind when we found out about the seat changes for this flight, switching us from 8A/B to 9B and 10A. Our new seats on the Airbus 320-200/300, which was changed out from an A320-231, were better than the exit seats we had booked and paid for. Even though the seating on the aircraft was 3-3, Mui’s exit row had only two seats … middle and aisle … or rather, aisle and aisle since there was no window seat next to him. This meant that my seat — 10A — had no seat in front of it, giving me extra legroom. That was a good thing since I was not in an exit row and the middle and aisle seats next to me were really tight legroom-wise.

Anyway, going through immigration was easy peasy … hardly anyone in line at the kiosks for domestic transfers. No line at the security checkpoint either. We’re now at Gate G2. The gate agents have arrived and preparations are underway to begin boarding our next flight.

More later …Read more