World Conference on Physics Education 2012 - 30 June 2012

We flew to to Istanbul on Emirates transiting at Dubai.  We were not told on the website when we booked the tickets that there was a stop at Colombo where we made a stop for an hour to drop off some passengers and pickup others.  In all the flight was okay, except that the seats were a little tight and I had this lady with his boy who kept putting things over to my seat and then putting the legs over to me as well.

Transiting at Dubai Airport

The transit at Dubai airport was a wait for approximately 4 hours.  Chiu Wai and I walked around to get a table to do some work, but there were only lounge chairs all around.  Cafes and restaurants were mainly quite packed and finally we had coffee (of course Chiu Wai will not have coffee, he had hot chocolate) at a cafe.  We chatted on work as we could not get any internet connections up though and had lunch later at Burger King.  We managed to locate the information counter to ask about wireless connection, but alas we were hungry by then and decided to eat instead.
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 Finally arrived at Istanbul Airport Atartuk at around 3 pm Istanbul time.  We waited for more than 30 minutes before we could collect luggage.  Managed to change some of my pounds leftover from the UK trip I went in 2009 to Turkish lira...though they gave me all in 100 notes.  Decided against changing all as the money changers in the airport will charge a commission of 4% and also it was difficult to change TL back to SGD in Singapore, so didn't want to incur additional charges again.

I bought a Turkcell SIM card so that I had data plan in Turkey, but it did cost me 85TL with only 30 TL value.
Later note:  By the time you activate it, Turkcell would have sent you a few SMS and you have only about 28TL left.  I could not activate the other prepaid broadband plans using the instructions from http://prepaid-wireless-internet-access.wetpaint.com/page/Turkey+Turkcell, and could not check my balance, in the end.  I just only surfed on 3G when necessary, keeping my fingers crossed that my money was available.

Figuring the way to the hotel was a nightmare, a few Taxi drivers could not know where our hotel was, it added to the frustration that our hotel was changed 2 days before the trip and after we have paid like 1 month ago!  A brave taxi driver finally claimed he knew were it was, though he was later all on the phone asking people where the hotel was.  And closer to the place, he had to ask a few more people walking on the road where it  was.  Arggh!  So obviously, it was not so obvious!  But finally we found one kind soul who knew it was.  It was in a quieter part near Taksim square down a very steep slope which is a chore to climb everyday.