On the move (updated)

Above is the picture taken from the 3rd floor of our Kusadasi, Turkey house, of the container loading operation. So the truck came 8 hours late, but the loading itself was very quick, and soon we were left in an echoey house, with strewn cardboard and bubblewrap and string everywhere, and virtually no furniture except for a few items.

We sold our AC units, our many propane gas bottles (for cooking, heating and hot water), our car, our TV, and we'll see if we can sell some of the stuff left behind. We also gave away to Gulnur, our cleaning woman, a lot of stuff, from furniture to kitchen wares, clothes, even all the food in our fridge and cabinets. That was good, she was delighted, as she got a cash severance payment (which she never expected) plus lots of stuff to take away, and a subsidized purchase of a large screen TV. It felt good to make her and her husband happy, as she has been so great to us. We will miss Gulnur.

Barbi spent all day in Izmir the day after we sent our stuff, handling customs. Now, we had hired (as required by law) a customs broker, who didn't do much at all. Barbi spent 10 hours in the Izmir harbor, which he said was pretty scary, and ended up having to pay bribes to 4 different customs officers in order to allow our container to leave. Very annoying because a) everything we were doing was completely legal, and b) we had engaged the services of a customs broker to handle the proceeding.

On Monday we flew to Istanbul, said goodbye to our friends there and left on Wednesday. The schlepping of the luggage (5 suitcases, plus 2 laptop backpacks, plus other "hand" luggage) was not something we were looking forward to, so we left all but the hand luggage in the airport. We stayed in the Tunel section of Istanbul, in a beautiful old, renovated apartment with our friends Jackie and Zeynep, who as always, were the most generous and gracious hosts.

Tuesday night we had dinner with a bunch of friends, it was great. Some of them I hadn't seen for years.

Me, Nahim, Umut, Sinan, Barbi, Haldun, Serai, Sema and Volkan. I know, Turkish names are so different...

Leaving Istanbul we were made to pay 374 euros in excess luggage, which sparked a fight and nasty outbursts from me. Actually they only charged us for 10 of the 50 excess kilos we were carrying... The trip was a bit longer than I expected, because of a 5+ hour layover in Madrid, which I thought was going to be shorter. There was nowhere to lie down, my back and feet hurt, so I ended up lying on the cold marble floor. The new Barajas airport is OK I guess, not pretty but better than the depressing shabby old one. The problem is they have those rows of seats with the individual arm-rests to prevent lying across several seats...



We loaded on interior design magazines, as usual, to the delight of my Mom. The flight Madrid-Montevideo was fine actually, we slept for about 9 hours, skipping dinner.

Thursday, we arrived at 8 AM in Montevideo, rented a small car, drove straight to see our new house, hang out for a few minutes with the whale in Pinares, Punta del Este, and finally arrived in the store at around noon.