Murder on the Occident Express

If anyone was going to get murdered on this train it would probably have to be, besides me in order to access all the wealth that people seem to assume I have, the dining cart attendant who insisted I tip him gratuitously.  Like, I mean really gratuitously.  But that was on the train going the other way.  This time around I just hung out in my own berth and then at Kayseri bolted off the train and demanded two kebabs from the nearest stand and was ready to run back and leap onto the train if it were to start departing.*  Luckily trains in Turkey go about 5 km/an hour so if I had the endurance I probably could have run and beaten it back to Constantinople.

Otherwise I spent a lot of time reflecting on the Caucasus, staring at my map of Europe, and carefully planning how many more stamps my poor, tattered passport could take, and cutting out little paper placeholders based on currently existing stamps.  I had a lot of time to kill.  Not enough time to finish War and Peace, however, which was proving to be one of the biggest challenges of my mid-20s.

The train stopped so many times along the way that I wasn’t surprised or alarmed when it stopped in suburban Constantinople on the Asian side and there was a bunch of hollering and a knock at my door.  I was told to pack up and get out.  The power had gone out and they had done all they could to get me to the city.  I tried to explain to them that no, getting me all the way would have meant paying for a taxi for me to the station, but that’s not the way Turkish Rail rolls (it barely rolls at all, actually) and it was a pretty severe blow to my deeply ingrained sense of entitlement.

So while there were a hundred taxis trailing the train waiting like vultures for something like this to happen, I decided to walk all the way, as I had been on a train for 48 hours.  It was a nice day, there was a lot to see, and I was able to plan exactly how I would escape from Turkey.  A couple of hours later I arrived at my old hostel, in the antique furniture district.  There was a team of Australians (surprise!) who called me worldly and gave me free juice.

*In 2007 I rolled into Romania thinking I was such hot shit and then realized that there was nowhere to sleep in Cluj Napoca so I crawled into a hedge in someone’s back yard and slept for a few hours and then went and caught a train to Brasov at 7am but could not for the life of me find track 3a.  I only realized it was some stubby spur line off to the side and just as the train was leaving I started bolting towards it and leapt off the platform and onto the last rug and tackled the conductor who was about to shut the door.  So Turkey wasn’t going to be a thing for me.