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7NNT25: Day 27 Cebu to Hong Kong
Soundtrack: [intentionally left blank] I don’t know how, given the time my head hit the pillow, that I was awake before the alarm. Possibly the magic of travel brain, that just kicks in to make sure I don’t oversleep and miss a flight (even when I also set two alarms to make sure). I’d given myself plenty of time to negotiate any traffic in getting back to the airport, but there wasn’t much, sparing me a good few minutes of easy listening radio. The Phillipines and easy listening radio. I don’t know if it’s something that drivers do when they’re picking up tourists, but pretty much every car I’ve taken…
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Baltics24: Day 17 – Istanbul
Still not Constantinople. Today was about ticking off the big ticket items, the Hagia Sofia (reminder, pronounced “aya sofiya”) and Topkapi Palace (rough translation “palace with too many stupid tourists”). The Hagia Sofia (translation “Holy Wisdom”) was built in the 6th Century to be a cathedral, after several other churches in the same spot had existed (the one immediately before was burnt down when some chariot racing politics got out of hand). Then when the Ottoman empire showed up, they stripped out all of the cathedral trappings and turned it into a mosque. Then came the Young Turks who turned it into a museum, before in 2020 the current folks…
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Baltics24: Day 9 – Tallinn – Riga
Hello Latvia! Having set an alarm to make sure that we’d be up in time for breakfast, check out, and a taxi to the bus station, we were awake well before. First there were the crowd of folks who decided to have a bit of a street party outside our window at 4am, I guess in fairness it was already light, but really? As much as no one really wants to be threatened with being dumped in a fountain at 4am, similarly no one wants to be woken up by the sound of this going on. All I can say is, thankfully, whatever nationality the group were, they weren’t English…
