Bangkok to Istanbul to Prague: Turkish Airlines score points for warm flannel blankets and metal cutlery (the knife is distinctly daggerlike, reminiscent of something a Turk might have used to slash Christian throats in times past), but loses them for the cabin being so cold that the blankets don’t suffice, and the meat (lamb? goat? a bit of old water buffalo?) so tough that the dagger+1 against infidels doesn’t make much headway against it (at least a dagger+3 against airline food would have been required). I give up and eat the broccoli and the desert. The tea is strong with a nice flavour that I don’t recognise - maybe it’s Turkish tea.

My next-door neighbour is an unwashed Turkish crusty with halitosis and a guitar that he manages to drop on the heads of myself and another passenger when he takes it out of the overhead locker. Between the cold and the smells from beside me I don’t sleep much. I have a 9 hour layover at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. The international section is smallish, but new and quite nice. I can’t sleep, so I buy some coffee-flavoured cigarillos and honey-flavoured cigars duty-free. I don’t normally smoke, but these are so cheap and look so nice that I can’t resist. They are indeed nice, and help to pass the time until takeoff, as do ‘A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination’ by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi and ‘The Sound of Fishsteps’ by Buket Uzuner.

Istanbul around the airport is a charmless red and grey sprawl of apartment blocks punctuated by occsional skyscrapers. The Istanbul of Aya Sofia and the Grand Bazaar is obviously Elsewhere, on the other side of some Invisible Cities-like barrier.

We leave for Prague on a 737 - no frills, but it’s only a short trip, and it’s daytime, and I have a window seat, so I bask in the sun and doze. This time my neighbours are two sweet young Turkish girls. The younger one is next to me and falls asleep on my arm. She feels like a kitten.

I forgot to mention - on the first flight there was a movie called G.O.R.A., a loopy Turkish sci-fi comedy about a tour guide of the enough-of-the-monuments-hurry-up-and-get-these-people-to-my-carpet-shop variety who gets kidnapped by some campy aliens. I liked it. Here’s a page with a picture and a review:

http://www.cinematical.com/2005/10/08/fantastic-fest-zathura-and-gora/